A secure, optional digital ID could be useful. But not in today’s UK. Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
- Snoopers’ Charter (Investigatory Powers Act 2016): ISPs must keep a year’s worth of records of which websites you visit. More than 40 agencies—from MI5 to the Welsh Ambulance Service—can request it. MI5 has already broken the rules and kept data it shouldn’t have.
- Encryption backdoors: Ministers can issue “Technical Capability Notices” to force tech firms to weaken or bypass end-to-end encryption.
- Online Safety Act: Expands content-scanning powers that experts warn could undermine privacy for everyone.
- Palantir deals: The government has given £1.5 billion+ in contracts to a US surveillance firm that builds predictive-policing tools and runs the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform. Many of those deals are secret.
- Wall-to-wall cameras: Millions of CCTV cameras already make the UK one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
A universal digital ID would plug straight into this ecosystem, creating an always-on, uniquely identified record of where you go and what you do. Even if paper or card options exist on paper, smartphone-based systems will dominate in practice, leaving those without phones excluded or coerced.
I’m not against digital identity in principle. But until the UK government proves it can protect basic privacy—by rolling back mass data retention, ending encryption backdoor demands, and enforcing genuine oversight—any national digital ID is a surveillance power-grab waiting to happen.
I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
Was reading through your post, finding it difficult to find fault with anything you were saying, but something wasn't sitting right. And then ...
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries
It has! In the Netherlands for example, it's just an incredibly convenient system, and if there's anything dodgy going on I'm not aware of it.
So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands? Genuine question, because I really don't know. My only guess is that the people of the Netherlands hold their politicians to account, whereas nothing ever seems to happen to UK politicians whose corruption is so severe that they're sometimes literally criminal.
It's the difference between proportional voting vs winner takes it all. In the latter case you can't really hold politicians accountable, as you will have to choose between effectively throwing your vote away or voting for the one opposition candidate, that often will be just as bad.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.
This might be a "grass is greener" thing. Do elected representatives actually have higher approval rating, or enact policies that better fit with public opinion, under proportional systems? Sure it'd probably make things a little better, but it won't actually solve anything hard, I think. All Western countries are struggling (and mostly failing) to deal with the same problems regardless of details like electoral system.
With proportionate representation you get what _should_ happen, in my opinion, which is sometimes nothing. If the coalition can't decide on something, then it doesn't happen, which is the correct outcome because not enough people agree about it. It represents the people (who also can not agree on it).
The alternative is a decision that most people don't agree with.
My view is it's always organised elites making the decisions, no matter the system. Nominally left-wing parties often make brazen right-wing moves, and vice-versa. The votes that matter are those of the MPs, Congress members etc. which are always influenced by a range of factors and organised factions. That's the actual decision-making mechanism.
It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.
I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.
Yeah, the UK's goverment does seem to be always be run by extremely unserious people. And yeah, I also don't know why this keeps being the case. It's not unique to the UK at all (actually I think it's mostly the norm, worldwide) but perhaps not quite as much the case in the Netherlands?
Italy has got an ID card since forever. Of course it was a piece of paper, it's a piece of plastic with a chip now. There is some experimentation to move that into the state app.
Everything accelerates when it becomes digital, for the better or for the worse. One thing that an ID does not do is preventing crime and allowing only legal jobs. People find a lot of ways to circumvent the rules as long as there are money to earn.
The same thing is happening in Greece. The new mandatory digital ID replaces and unifies everything about citizens in one place, "to make it easier for government services to share information between each other". It can indeed be useful, but the privacy implications are enormous. Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk. Nobody knows what other information could be attached to it, but it's certain that it can be used to discriminate against us.
The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it. Eventually, after it goes through the testing phase in the UK and Greece (and a few other countries where it's being implemented), this will probably roll out on a global scale, making privacy impossibly. I'm starting to get this feeling that in the next decade, we'll be living in 1984...
Before the election I was approached by a bubbly young woman who tried to persuade me to vote Labour: "No thanks, last time I did that they tried to introduce ID cards", "But that's not in our manifesto" she replied, "It wasn't the last time I voted for them either".
It all depends on exactly when they're mandatory and what tracking is associated with them.
My own personal thinking has evolved on the subject since I campaigned against ID cards under Blair ("no2id"). It is a question of trust and purpose. Things like the Estonian digital identity scheme do not seem to be bad in practice. The problem comes from identity checkpoints, which serve as an opportunity for inconvenience, surveillance, and negligence by the authorities.
Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal? The Windrush fiasco (itself a story of identity and records)?
And anything born of an immigration crackdown is coming out of the gate with a declared intention to be paranoid and authoritarian.
Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain.
With your logic, everything can be used, or change to be used in a bad way, so nothing should be changed. There is never a guarantee. Seriously, is there anything which cannot be changed to be shit, in the best case to be a worthless money pit?
Edit: btw this proposal already has something which can be criticised: ID on mobile phones… so probably they’d lock everybody into a duopoly.
there's a difference between "the police can request this information from an individual" and "this information will be automatically gathered from everyone at all times and stored by the state". for one, there are circumstances in which the police are allowed to request that information and you can say "no", and there are also practical limits to the number of police that can be out requesting. The central equivalence you're trying to draw here is simply false.
They'll invoke one of the more ambiguous sections, it's usually the anti-terrorism one, but sometimes is the anti-drugs one (i can't remember the numbers), and they'll detain then arrest you and haul you to the police station.
You can complain later, and maybe get some pounds out of it, but make no mistake: if the uk police wants you identified, they will identify you.
The nuance is that you can have a NI number, then have your visa lapse for whatever reason - you still have the NI number. Hence the requirement to prove your right to work through another means.
Previously you could use proof of British nationality or a physical biometric residence card - but they've been replaced by the digital share code system (which tbh hasn't been too bad)
Sorry I worded that poorly - I was trying to make the point that citizens prove their right to work using passport/birth certificate, and until recently visa holders used a physical BRP, and now a digital system (which oddly enough uses your expired/redundant BRP number as a username)
If you want to prove your age, there are a host of *voluntary* forms of identity you can carry if you wish to do so. Please tell me how a new *compulsory* scheme (with privacy invading overreach) is going to help you.
Showing a birth certificate isn’t a particularly hard bar to pass if you want to fake that you’re a national to be fair. You need just that and a printed letter and there’s nothing an employer will do beyond copying that (afaik you can’t look up a birth certificate and check it’s valid)
You are correct and this won't help. The government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this proposal but I think people can see through it. That should really raise a red flag.
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.
How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.
In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.
The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.
It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.
> In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular.
The circular issue is quite similar to Spain. Where in order to obtain residency you need an address. But for being able to rent, most likely you’ll need a bank account and ideally a Spanish identification number. But for having a local bank account you need an address.
Similar to the above. This needs to be broken in order to get residency.
In Portugal it gets even worse, because many landlords still ask for a guarantor willing to take responsability over the rent.
My experience in a few European countries was also circular, the only thing that helped was that I could use the work contract and a letter from HR to break the cycle, however this naturally only works when the job is already secure before coming into the country.
AFAIK the recommended way is to open a bank account through smaller banks (aka neobanks). They just send you a card to address specified and once you activated it you (first) get a bank account for payments and (second) can use it to prove address for others.
Also, if you legally rent then you get the council tax documents, though it takes roughly a month for them to send. This is another proof of address.
And the bills of course, but again it takes a month or so to receive the first letter.
So it's unclear how a digital ID solves anything in regarding the proof of address.
> The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
They already ask you for a "share code" which they then verify on the Home Office website. What does the Digital ID add to that?
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries.
It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".
Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.
At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades.
Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.
So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.
A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.
So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.
I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
You are correct.
The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise.
The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action.
So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
… except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?).
The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
It’s amazing to see Labour fall for the same trick that the Tories did with Brexit, and also incredible that Farage is still a political force after all the Brexit lies.
I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not.
> unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters
Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway.
The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
> Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air
Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
we spent decades dying to "measured improvements". I don't like what my peers did about the fact that they're angry or what in particular they demanded but I don't begrudge them being angry or demanding something. You can only bullshit people about their basic living conditions for so long and long ago our political class gave up on the idea of working for people as their raison d'etre and decided instead that their job was to give us as little as it takes in order to get our votes and then use the power we give them to funnel money back to their donors. The mistake wasn't in realzing that the "left" wasn't on their side, it was in thinking that the right was just because they were the ones who pointed out how feckless, entitled and self-absorbed the center-right elitists that pass themselves off as the left had become.
Agreed, but unfortunately at times when things seem not to be going so well in general, people are prone to electing the person that promises them large positive changes by throwing out the stale old rulebook. Even if it’s not credible. Even when large parts of what’s apparently going wrong have been invented by that same bad actor…
I think this is part of why Brexit got through as well, some people felt it was a way to shake up a crusty, unresponsive establishment. That didn’t go so great!
Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.
For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.
The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.
What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.
I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.
Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.
Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.
Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?
Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas
IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference.
And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades.
I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business.
Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low.
It's a popular stereotype in the UK (although it only seems to have arisen in the last year or so) that "Turkish barbershops" are a front for money laundering.
They're certainly suspicious: all across the country, high street retailers are going bust, and yet somehow all these barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints etc are staying in business, able to afford prime commercial real estate even though you never see anyone in there getting their hair cut or their nails done.
I don't know why the Turks in particular are being singled out, but that's the meme. The "American Candy Stores" in London are another famous example.
There's an old saying where I'm from that the barbershop is the safest line of work because everyone needs their hair cut.
Where I am, admittedly in the Netherlands but I grew up in the UK and haven't noticed a huge difference, nail salons are always quite full when I pass, and I see food delivery drivers almost every time I look out the window. Similarly the barbers always seem to have clients. Could be the time of day you look?
Just going to throw it out there that it's a bit disconcerting to see these kind of criminal stereotypes associated with a certain people on HN.
What a lovely framing that is. Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever. Then, finally, in one of these inevitable spasms of authoritarianism, they do away with it and we're now turned away from the polling station unless we can show our permission slip.
Then they come up with even more papers for us, and the argument for it is that it's now a benefit that we can more easily comply with Voter ID laws.
Bugger off with that. Don't talk to me about any "benefit" in relation to voter ID that isn't abolishing it.
> Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever.
I don’t disagree at all, however we are where we are. The laws were introduced by a different government in a failed bid to maintain power by disenfranchising voters less likely to have ID.
That being said, we are where we are and having government-provided ID is a benefit in that context.
If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.
If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.
Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research.
No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.
Most companies will not pay a local employee to an international amount. You're also going to pay quite large fees for any transfers if you wanted to pay bills. Also, the account abroad is not a proof of address in the UK which is the thing you want from statements.
Long time ago when I came to the UK I had that exact problem, there was only one bank (HSBC I think) that agreed to open an account for based on passport only. Even though I'm an EU citizen and UK was part of the EU at that time. Otherwise I would be stuck, because my employer (no employer I know of) would send my wage overseas.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem
It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).
It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.
Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.
Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.
Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.
> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true?
Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.
> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment.
Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR).
The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet]
Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other.
Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)...
Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
> Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like?
There is, but it's not tied to any strong identity verification process, and so there's a thriving fraud where unemployed citizens will rent out their numbers to working illegals. It's not something that the tax office has ever really worried about, since if anything it tends to increase the amount of tax paid (if several people are sharing the same tax ID they'll pay a higher tax rate), and while they might bat an eye at someone with 5 different salaried jobs it's not particularly suspicious when it's gig economy work.
To work, you need to provide a National Insurance number, which is unique and tied to certain state benefits like pension. The idea is you work, pay "national insurance" contributions and accrue "contributing years" to get a state pension later.
The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.
Tax numbers have no bearing at all on your right to work. If you work legally in the UK for a while then you get a national insurance number but if you then leave and your work visa expires, your national insurance number remains as an identifier.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?
Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.
During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
Checking for right to work has been legally required for over a decade. Checks in the formal economy are now routine. Can sometimes be a nuisance, like for my friend who doesn't have a passport and his driving license was issued before those went photographic.
Someone who is prepared to pay people smugglers to help them cross a border illegally may not choose to restrict themselves to working in "the formal economy".
"Illegal working and streams of taxis - BBC gains rare access inside asylum hotels"
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents
For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.
Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.
So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.
I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act.
You know, coincidentally.
(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)
I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of?
In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.
Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.
Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.
So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.
And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.
Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.
A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job), drivers license and passport, one of latter is also needed (in practice) to get a job.
Why would a brit card help us reduce the number of people working illegally?
The only notable 'employers' of illegal workers in the UK are American tech firms Uber and deliveroo (doordash) because they allow driver substitution without verifying that the substitute is legit. That should be made illegal and then fine them into the ground for anyone who slips through. Brit card doesn't help and is a distraction.
You don't need the card itself in order to get a job, just the number. In this respect it's rather like an American social security card. (I know some US employers will ask to see the card, but that's not a legal requirement: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/SSNcard.htm)
But the person you're replying to, just explained to you, how the government already have the relevant data. So it's clearly not about data, because the government already issue his NINO and passport
Edit - I mean, just play it back in your head. The PM is probably watching small boat arrivals and reform polling numbers like a hawk. And here's his idea to fix both problems, and you're saying, actually no, the PM is just doing this to get data on where I go to work, even though they already have my PAYE details
I guess the guy above is right. It is about the data and the right to use your face and track you everywhere. This can be easily paired with that UK bonkers camera ai thing.
They might not need to know who is illegal, but if the camera does not know you, you might need to explain yourself and show an id.
At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc
Government already have my photo for passport and driver's license, I struggle to believe that there's people here working who don't have at least a provisional license or passport of any kind.
In order to drive a motorcycle or car you need a driving license which has photo ID?
Ok maybe you deliver by push bike.. but if you arrived here legally you will have a passport? If you didn't you ergo don't have the right to work here?
Outsourced to companies that don’t share data, which is why the government is requiring you to submit more data. How hard is this? Eventually they’ll have your DNA, Fingerprints, photos, family trees, employment history, money, spending habits, vices, travel locations, conversations, and your comings and goings via license plate readers.
I beleive that Labour see this new ID system as the solution to all the age verification questions now required by the Online Safety Act. e.g. access to things like Reddit, BlueSky messaging, Spotify.
With that in mind I think new data you're talking about will be enhanced tracking and monitoring on everyday online activity of UK citizens.
I don't think it is only online.
It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
I honestly understand the problem with immigration, but at the same time, I think this way of approaching the problem is just to create "the enemy" from 1984.
It seems that immigrants right now move something between 4B-10B a month in UK which is not a small number.
Considering the costs elsewhere altogether, it seems quite small win for the risk.
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.
Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
> A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - paper birth certificate is also acceptable, as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
This policy would absolutely sail through, with no controversy at all, if it had just been "free passports for all" reusing all the existing rules, existing IT and existing bureaucracy; and "Optional digital passport on your phone" for those who want that.
Why they're doing this in the most expensive, unpopular way possible - I have no idea.
You don't currently have any National ID. You have forms of ID, which others might not have, but none are national mandatory ID that every citizen and resident has. As such many benefits in streamlining and simplifying processes cannot be achieved when everyone has a UID as such. Imagine making a system where you used various ID formats, and you couldn't guarantee anyone had one in particular, and some people had none.
Your NI card literally says it's not identification. A NI number is not linked to a passport as it's not mandatory to have a passport, so that would not work for many people. It is just a number used for tax accounting.
Ok then 'Government issued [photo] ID' so what if it's not a 'national ID'? They have all the data they need to tackle this. You can't get a NI number without proving who you are, if the government don't trust NI numbers (which they are minting?) then they could simply re-issue them? That would be far far easier than a new national ID.
>You can't get a NI number without proving who you are
That's not true either. You're sent your NI number just before 16 years old without providing anything.
Also, an NI number is just a number. There is no photo. How can you look at it and say it belongs to the person presenting it? And no you can't look up a passport or something in another system based on the NI number, because those other IDs aren't mandatory so the person might not have them.
The only way to really ID someone is to have mandatory photo ID, whether that be digital or not.
How do you think HMRC know to send you a card? If they're giving them out like smarties to foreigners then they could simply... Not (a British person gets one as a function of having a birth certificate)
Now that ID is required for voting, it's reasonable that the government provides a form of ID, for free, to all citizens. Passports cost money and not everyone has one. Same for driving licenses. It should also streamline other government services.
I think it would be simpler to repeal the ID requirement for voting. I don't believe there is any evidence of widespread voting fraud, so it adds unnecessary cost. I certainly wouldn't try to sell the ID as preventing illegal work, which is obviously ludicrous.
> There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it - but digital ID will be mandatory as a means of proving your Right to Work.
So it's mandatory for everyone except old people and the unemployed. It will almost certainly also be mandatory for renting, which has the same check. Then it will gradually seep into everything else: benefits and pensions, to cover the categories not initially covered. Then police spot checks and ICE sweeps.
> its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it
It's strange how last time I campaigned against ID cards 25 years ago, none of those requirements were in place. Voter ID in particular is a very recent idea imported from the US (and of course doesn't apply to postal votes, where there are actually real concerns about security and diversion).
Using the name of the US body to associate it with the immigration sweeps carried out in an abusive manner; the corresponding UK immigration raids are currently the responsibility of the Home Office.
> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.
Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?
This is the most alarming aspect of the proposal to me. I find it wild that the government will require me, by law, to buy an expensive electronic device I don't want or otherwise need, in order to be employed. It's absolutely amazing to me that the government is forcing me to spend money in this way.
They've already said you won't need a mobile phone. They mention phones as a deliberate distraction from the fact that they will be building a huge central database.
I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.
(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)
They have said it will work for people who "aren’t able to use a smartphone". Nothing is said about people who are able but unwilling. I can only assume I will forced to submit to the terms and conditions of a foreign corporation, and forced to use non-Free software.
Having just paid a small fortune to renew my passport. I'm not super excited about this, especially as I live outside the UK.
I also don't trust them not to make a complete hash of all this, removing all potential utility while simultaneously increasing the chances of my ID being stolen.
As an American it seems to me that the UK government insists on finding a way to upset all sides on any given issue like illegal immigration. If anything it's the singular and unique skill of Whitehall.
And "become customers" means it will become mandatory to sign away your rights to a foreign corporation by agreeing to their terms of service. This kind of abuse of power is a clear example of why the UK needs a real constitution.
And if Google bans you for some reason (which they have been known to do sometimes), I guess you'll be kicked out of the country unless you buy an iPhone.
A real constitution is not a vague collection of traditions. Every other country understands "constitution" to mean a written document. A collection of traditions cannot meet the primary aim of a constitution, which is granting people clear and unambiguous rights.
Furthermore, a constitution is generally more difficult to change than a law. The Human Rights Act can be repealed by a simple majority of MPs voting to repeal it.
I didn't watch the video, but have read other reports, and it's worth noting that the context for this is the Labour Party conference, which starts on Sunday. The UK govt are under pressure from the tories and Reform to do something about people entering the UK from France by crossing the channel in small boats. Nothing much seems to be working. So this announcement is about trying to control the narrative by making a big, distracting announcement. I'd mlbe surprised if many people in the government/police/civil service expect it to make a difference.
Also, seems to be intended to be mandatory and require a smartphone. Hows that going to work?
Also, what happens when the database is inevitably stolen?
The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.
I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.
Depends on if you are looking at this in terms of numbers of people or cost. The Home Office annual spend on processing asylum seekers has ballooned from just under £1 billion to near £5 billion in the space of 5 years, which is 1/3 of the estimated £14 billion raised from the unpopular National Insurance increase.
Even then, what fraction of all asylum seekers comes via small boats, vs other means? I believe the UK is entirely within its right to send small boats asylum seekers back to France, since it is a safe country. International conventions on asylum seekers state this - you are not entitled to drive thru the whole of Europe then demand asylum specifically in the UK.
I don't want to come across as uncaring, I'm sure there are tragedies that drive people to doing this, that doesn't mean the UK has to also mismanage the process on its side.
From what I've read, about 1/3 of all asylum seekers over the last 7 years arrived via small boat crossings.
Looking forward though, about 90% of those arriving in small boat crossings are currently going on to seek asylum and the average annual cost of supporting an asylum seeker during their claim has risen to an estimated £41k, so for ~30k arrivals this year, the financial cost of not processing these claims promptly could increase that overall annual bill further still.
Also, in the first year of processing, costs may be drawn from the overseas aid budget (which was recently shrunk). This results in possibly 1/5 of the overseas aid budget being used for costs associated with processing asylum claims, which perhaps doesn't match most people's expectations as to what overseas aid should be used for.
I think that's why even though the number of people involved in these crossings is small compared to net migration, it has a big financial impact.
The UK was indeed part of treaty system that meant other states had to "take back" asylum seekers that traveled through them to the UK, but it decided it was in its best interest to quit that a few years ago, so France is a lot less motivated to do that now.
0.8m is like on the average a whole county in the UK, and such massive influx would destroy the housing- and job market. Not to mention pressure on schools and healthcare.
Exactly, this is what I am saying. The 0.8-1m number is the legal, net migration into the UK, very significant, and adding to the downsides people associate with immigration. It's not all downsides etc etc but still.
The 37k small boats migration is very small in comparison. Plus there's illegal immigration not via small boats - overstayed visas etc.
Hence my point that the overfocus on small boats crossings seems misplaced to me.
The actual number is like half of that because while 800k people came, about 400k people left.
I am an immigrant myself but I start to think that such policies are short-sighted. The end result is often fragmentation of the society, because immigrants rarely truly integrate, and at some point they become the majority, and then you're effectively a minority in your own country. It takes at least two generations for newcomers to become fully integrated, and that assumes things going right.
“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work.
They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.
What are the options legally available to them? They have their own experts, but it sounds like you have a novel idea that hasn't occurred to anyone before.
Stick them in processing centres until they can be deported. Send a clear message to anyone who might come that it won't work, you won't get in, we won't give you anything, don't risk your life or waste your money.
Australia did exactly this (in the face of howling opposition) and it worked: illegal boat arrivals dropped from ~20,000 per year to almost zero. Thousands of people used to drown attempting the crossing, now no-one drowns. There's your moral case.
Legally, Parliament is sovereign. If the current legal framework doesn't allow it, change the law. Except they won't, because they don't want to solve the problem and they use the law as an excuse as if they aren't the fucking government.
I'm genuinely wondering how harsh you'd be willing to be to get what you want.
What would you do if an individual can't be deported because no country will accept them? Or if their country of origin is likely to kill or torture them? Or if no commercial carrier is willing to risk operating to that country? Would you be willing to deport unaccompanied children with no guarantee that they'd be cared for?
This is a perniciously xenophobic take, tbh.
Who are you to decide your values are objectively better than theirs? /s
There is a village A dragon comes to the village every year. In exchange for 2% of the children, it spares the rest and promises its “magical” protection from unseen enemies. This arrangement has lasted 2,000 years. Most villagers worship it, even though the custom has left their village far worse off than others in the land.
Some villagers move away. Not all of them are dragon-worshippers, but some are and they still try to summon the dragon.
Now the dragon free villagers face a choice:
Keep them out. But that means some innocent children among them will die.
Let them in. Risk the cult spreading again inside the walls and possibly bringing the dragon back.
Go kill the dragon themselves. Accept substantial casualties including innocent dragon worshippers and some of their own people.
Killing the dragon would mean temporarily brutal treatment of the worshippers and the destruction of their culture, but it would spare future generations from an unbounded amount of suffering.
I won't hold my breath. It'll take 5 times longer than planned, cost 10 times more, won't do everything it originally set out to do, then won't work on the tech that everyone will have when finished, and a future government will decide they don't like it and will start over.
This is a natural and unfortunate consequence of crime and foreign aggression getting increasingly borderless. As the world gets smaller, and as more and more of the world's population knows about the outside world, the more badness we face.
Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.
Perhaps the better solution is to stop opening up and make a concerted effort to return to a high-trust society, rather than destroy privacy and go full authoritarian polite-state?
Or must we absolutely must accept eg every Nigerian, Pakistani, Syrian, Afghan, Indian etc who has a fleeting desire emigrate, else our society will collapse?
Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants? How big is it compared to, for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
Or are those things somehow related?
I would be crazily scared to know that immigrant care workers will leave NHS as most hospitals relies on them.
The government already made clear they won't pay people more nor will give more benefits for NHS workers and I am quite sure not Brits will take those spots when Tesco express pays more for less hours of work with more benefits.
>Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants?
This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000. Those elected have consistently ignored them which has raised tensions.
In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.
>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?
The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.
I think there's some conflation happening here (not necessarily from the above comment).
Those figures relate to general immigration, which wouldn't be affected by ID schemes since people are given approval by the government to arrive and work in the UK. If the government wanted to reduce regular immigration, it could just decide to award less visas.
The ID scheme would only affect irregular immigration which is much lower (approx 50,000 a year by the governments stats, obviously hard to know how accurate that is, but much lower than 1 million[0]).
If you look at the countries that are lauded at having the best online government services. They all have some type of digital ID.
Having something like that is imo. a cornerstone for building out top notch digital governmental services, and I don't fault the UK for trying to get this in place.
That being said, I'm not convinced it will be that much of a blocker for illegal workers. I'm sure they will find a way around it.
It's incredibly misleading to call a phone app a "card". This is much worse than it sounds. Am I going to be forced to buy a smartphone? Am I going to be forced to run non-Free software? Am I going to be forced to enter into a restrictive contract with a foreign corporation?
Hah this is the UK. No, it'll be optional to begin with to make people like you asking important questions seem like a whacko. Then once they use propaganda to make people opt into it, and it reaches mass adoption, then it'll quietly be made mandatory - or extremely annoying not to have it
"Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said ID cards were not in the party's election manifesto and added: "That’s not our approach.""
– July 2024
"Asked about the possibility of introducing digital ID cards, Mr Reynolds [then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, now Chief Whip] told Times Radio: "We can rule that out, that's not something that's part of our plans.""
In addition to all the issues mentioned in the article, this seems to mean that UK citizens will effectively be forced to accept the terms of service of one of two US companies (Apple or Google). If you must have either an Android or iOS device to run this digital ID app (which presumably will be distributed via the Play Store on Android), there's no other option!
For me a big red flag is that the government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this: "in an effort to crack down on illegal migrant workers" is complete, transparent rubbish.
Of all the things there are to complain about these ID cards, I don’t think this is the one to choose.
Starmer has been ambivalent on ID cards (at least compared to Blair, who must think Xmas has come twice this year). Really the only reason this is being introduced is because it lets Labour look like they’re trying to tackle illegal immigration/employment/benefits-claiming.
Reform (led by Trump’s mini-me) is making political progress hand over fist by casting immigration as the root of all evil. I’m pretty certain this is Labour’s response. They don’t want the populist (otherwise known as “batshit insane”) policies Reform are proposing (“end all immigration, send all immigrants back home”) - but a more-moderate “you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits” seems on-message to me.
So for once it might just be ok to take a politicians word at face value. This doesn’t preclude nefarious use later on, of course…
If that's Labour's response to Reform UK then it is the most ill-thought-out, if not idiotic, possible:
There is a real issue with immigration in the UK.
People want actual action on immigration, not gimmicks, not lies. The Conservatives were annihilated because their voters caught up with the fact that they were lying (talking tough while actually pushing immigration higher).
Those Digital IDs would do nothing against illegal immigration considering existing right to work and right to rent legal checks. It is clear and people see it, so see previous point. "you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits" is already the case and has always been the case. He is copying the disastrous Conservative strategy to talk tough while doing nothing and in fact actually keeping immigration up.
There have been previous attempts to introduce ID cards. People have always been generaly against them and the most against them are probably those already supporting Reform UK or the libertarians on both sides. So he's only eroding the little support he has left (progressist liberals) while strengthening the opinion of those already against him. I was looking at the readers' comments on The Guardian and there are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. So if even them turn against Starmer he is well and truly toast.
I don't understand how people are able to work in the UK illegally without employers already breaking the law. Employers are required to pay payroll taxes for their employees and you need a national insurance number for the employee to do this. I'm not sure how this fixes something that should already be fixed.
There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.
I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"
Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.
I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.
The MPs never read anything. You got sent back one of a few pre-written replies by a secretary. I was stupid enough to reply to one of those replies once and never got anything back.
This is just wishful thinking. They're not going to make all of the farm workers, many of whom have difficulty reading ANY language (let alone English), download an "app" and install it on their phone.
"In 2024, a significant portion of the UK adult population, approximately 8.5 million people (1 in 6), struggles with reading and writing at a basic level, according to The Reading Agency's 2024 report"
Maybe they'll have an exception for people who are more migratory in nature. In that event, I think we'll get to see a nice real-world example of a cyberpunk-style dystopia. "High tech, low life". The upstanding citizens will be surveilled, preyed upon by corruption, and will be running on a social credit score treadmill designed to work them to death. Meanwhile, a plucky band of rebel farm workers, who are free to work outside the system, will bring down the establishment and bring freedom to all. Roll credits.
I just wonder how widespread fraud is without any form of ID.
A fake utility bill is just a few clicks away on my PC.
Govt surveillance? I'm much more worried by the ever increasing number of cameras in the streets rather than something similar to having a passport to prove who you really are.
What's the benefit of this over a passport? A passport is a physical thing, so you don't need to have a phone to be able to use it, proves who you are with the same details as this digital ID, and will probably require a similar amount of paperwork to get hold of
You usually don't want to carry a passport with you at all times. In some European countries (e.g., the Nordics), you have your ID, driver’s license, firearm license, etc., all in a government app that can be verified with an app used by officials. You can also sign and authenticate all paperwork with the same system
I use my passport to verify my right to work in the US during the first week of my job, and then I don't bring it any other time. So unless you're changing jobs very frequently it shouldn't be necessary to carry all the time. A bigger issue would be that many people do not have passports.
Easy and cheap regular checks on the spot presential or/and online, as frequently as you want vs rare scheduled difficult and expensive checks.
Possibilities get realised such as regular remote checks (ie selfie to prove you are the id owner holder, address proof, etc, flagging odd id holder behaviour or employer, etc). Currently, you cannot do this, no visibility into who works where and where that person even resembles the person meant to be working for [insert gig company].
I do selfie to prove I match my driver's license all the time (needed for app based banks, and so on)?
The government absolutely knows where I work, are you joking? That's what NI numbers are for. You seriously think there isn't a join table in a government database with my NI number and passport number?
There are other workers in the UK aside from you. The policy affects them too not just you. You are getting the business requirements wrong. You are unlikely to be the main reason for the policy. Folks getting paid under minimum wage such as some gig workers using someone else's identity are the main target.
If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
> If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Simple. Overstaying or/and expired passport will lead to that. Valid status is not a fixed binary state. It is better described as a function of personal id, rights docs and current time. Currently, the checks are more akin to updating a Boolean column on rare occasions. Digital id countries do checks more like function calls that you can perform easily and quickly
RTW already requires ID plus NI, but OK what about if we just said 'free passports' and then said passport or driving licence plus NI is needed to get a job here. If you have a foreign passport and no UK driving licence then yes you'll have to keep that up to date in order to work here, c'est la vie.
To the extent this is technically possible, if the gig economy companies wanted to do this, they could do it already.
When the driver signs up, check their passport or driving license in the normal manner, and take a matching portrait you keep on file. Any time you want to, compare a selfie to the portrait on file.
Reason they don't do this is it's profitable to hire people who can't legally work in the UK, if they can get away with it - and the government lets them get away with it.
I would trust the Nordic governments to write an app to put on my phone and not slurp up all my data and spy on me with it. I can't say the same about the British government
Can't use your passport online. In Sweden we have bank id, its used for everything from validating purchases, logging in to banks, government or other websites, to sign documents, get a loan, etc. To get it you would need to go to a bank and present a proper ID, the ones using bank id for auth or otherwise only get your name and personal number.
One of the problems the UK has is that our two primary government IDs – driver licenses and passports – are not universally issued. Instead, these IDs have requirements and must be applied for at a cost, so not everyone has one.
This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).
With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.
They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.
A passport is the universal identity document. It's way too valuable to carry around and expediting a new passport is costly and slow. Checks need to be done in person and the passport holder needs to be told in advance about the check (so impromptu checks don't work and expired passports get through, also catching fake passports and the like is hard).
A digital ID as its name says is digital, checks can be done remotely (as often as you want) in a secure environment with physical checks possible in addition to that. Regular and unscheduled checks are possible with a digital id after the initial check both presential and remote. Online checks especially can cover for things like the same id being used in multiple places, it also means employers cannot fudge it as the actual repository of truth lies online. None of this is possible with a passport.
Citizen IDs and more recently digital IDs have been used in Europe for decades now. Having a redundant piece of ID is incredibly valuable.
The fact that the UK doesn’t allow “impromptu checks”, otherwise known as “Papers please!” is not a bug, it’s a feature that distinguishes our democracy from other states and we are pretty proud of it.
There is nothing undemocratic about checking whether you are compliant with employment regulations on a regular manner anymore than it is to check whether your gas installation is compliant with gas regulations or your voting registration is compliant with voting policy. It is completely orthogonal. You might not be in favour of a policy but that does not mean that the policy is undemocratic.
In the UK you do not have to have your drivers license upon your person when driving a car. Usually you'll be instructed to present it to a nearby police station within a few days.
Not required by law in the UK to have ID on you while driving. Works well enough (you have to produce it at a station within 7 days). I'm sure if it's serious enough, the police can force some other method
In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.
The government has been able to do checks on me using my passport number etc, like when I was getting my provisional driving license, so somewhere there is a digital version of it on a government server or something. Can't they just make that information available?
What impromptu checks would you need this ID for? The use cases I've seen for it are to make sure you are legal to work, and when renting a house, both of which are circumstances that you can be told about beforehand
That is not what I mean. Doing checks using your passport number is not good enough . It only proves that you someone used your passport number for a job. It doesn't prove it's you. It doesn't prove that you didn't swap with someone else (worker proxy). A digital id is a token fully controlled that opens compliance possibilities that are not possible or financially feasible by using just a passport number because the government does not control the passport numbers of everyone (especially those for which this policy is intended).
Think: the ability to verify that the id owner's face resembles the face of the id holder. The ability to check that the id owner address matches that of the id holder. The ability to flag employers containing id owner employees regularly failing those checks. The ability to do this regularly without previous notice to the id owner at national scale remotely or in person is a level of compliance you will never get even halfway with just using a passport number.
The driving license application page pulled up my photo from giving it my passport number. That photo of me proves that I am the owner of that passport. I recently gave my work my passport information to prove that I was legal to work there. If we need a new system to prove that I am legal to work there, then how was it good enough to use my passport for that?
I’ve always lived in places where having an ID on you has been part of your “citizen responsibilities”. So reading the post my feeling was “oh cool, they’re getting a new eID-like system”. But I imagine it’s a huge step if folks could get by without an ID at all.
In this case, sounds like you'll not just be required to carry an ID. Everyone in the country will be legally required to carry an Android phone or iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store. Pretty vague so far.
In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.
At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.
And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.
So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.
The counterpoint to this is obviously that the requirement to present ID to vote is tantamount to voter suppression - iirc there is no “free” form of ID in the UK.
As an ex-Brit I am also used to carrying an ID and a drivers license, and I’ve always found it quite weird that you can’t get an ID card of any kind that isn’t a full-fledged passport or a drivers license.
I mean I guess this new thing is going to be free?
I also don't live in the UK any more, still a brit and not yet Australian, but I have had to adjust to it being necessary to carry your license here when driving. It means I can't really leave home without my wallet, which is odd. We're getting electronic licenses before long though, hopefully.
Honestly no idea. Hopefully! And hopefully you’ll be able to vote with it.
I just have a magnetic wallet on the back of my iPhone with the two cards and my travel card, so I always have them. I don’t carry a physical payment card or cash so don’t need a wallet otherwise
That is very surprising. In the US, you are legally required to carry your license when driving. If you are caught driving without one, expect to be arrested.
Also the US reserves the right to demand ID if you're within 100 miles of a border - which is effectively 2/3 of the population. And detain you until your status can be "verified", however long that could take.
That should only be for non-citizens, but I have no idea how you could prove that without documentation in the first place.
So for the vast majority of Americans, you probably have to be carrying ID at all times anyway, else you risk someone deciding you "might" not actually be a citizen.
If this same rule was enacted in the UK, there would be no place on the British Isles that would be excluded, as nowhere is more than 100 miles from the coast.
In France you have to carry a state issued ID regardless of your location within the country. Driving license might be asked to be provided if there is an assumption you have one. A lasting legacy of the 40s.
In practice the pseudo-crime of being "suspicious looking" also requires ID. Good luck if you want to argue your constitutional rights. Immigration status is topical for the current era. Something as benign as walking up the street to pickup takeout could involve identifying yourself to the police and waiting for them to clear you for warrants.
That hasn’t been my experience, perhaps it’s state to state. I’ve been stopped without ID and had no problem. I’ve even boarded a plane through TSA without my license.
We already have multiple forms of identification. The National Insurance number, passports and photo ID such as driving licences, which we must provide when starting employment.
If you're not from Britain, you must present evidence of your right to work or other documentation. This is already the law.
Any company that does not follow this is violating the law.
In reality, most illegal workers are engaged in cash-in-hand jobs that never require ID. A digital ID alone will not solve this problem.
Adding a digital ID won't make any difference.
We've also seen similar issues with the UK's attempt to censor adult content "to protect children." It sounds reasonable on the surface (no child should have open access to the internet!). Still, the law was written so broadly that even community clubs involving children with no relation to adult content were caught in its provisions.
Threatened by fines and bureaucratic red tape, many closed their doors. International sites that had no idea what to do - now block the UK. And did this stop access to explicit content? No. Anyone can use a VPN, or an anonymity-oriented browser like Brave and use a Tor tab to bypass the blocks completely. For the non-technical, how long before these Age ID check services, which the government wants everyone to use (private companies owned mainly by adult companies), are hacked and everyone's viewing habits are released?
How long before we're required to use our Digital ID to log on to the internet, enabling monitoring of everything we browse?
A more innovative approach would be for ISPs to by default integrated parental controls on residential connections, something that has been technically possible for decades. In fact, any mobile phone contract in the UK operates similarly. Why not home internet? This isn't about new legislation; it's about education.
Parents already understand why they shouldn't give alcohol or tobacco to their children; why not teach them how to protect their children online?
The new NHS app and driving licence app are expected to be available by the end of 2025. How long before they're integrated into a single system where the government maintains one massive database containing every individual's driving information, medical records, browsing history, banking and tax details? It's not far-fetched to imagine such overreach occurring.
Also as of this week, HMRC (our UK tax office) also now has the right to raid any UK bank account for taxes owed (leaving only £5,000 in the account). This applies to both individuals and companies. Consider a company that becomes insolvent days before paying salaries how will they pay their workers? Some companies have already become insolvent after paying wages while still owing taxes and National Insurance. Just HMRC now get their money and the employees won’t.
I realise there are several loosely connected points above, but that's precisely the problem: all these developments have emerged over the past 18 months.
So when the UK government claims these measures are "for the people," the argument falls flat.
It's difficult to believe that policymakers don't recognise these fundamental flaws.
This raises the question: what's the real motivation? To me, it seems less about protection and more about monitoring and control, implemented by people too afraid to speak against their superiors.
At nearly 50, I see a UK very different from the one I was born into. One thing I know for sure: once this process begins, it will only worsen, and a new government will maintain these systems and extend them further. We left Europe - but kept every single law! As a nation, we just allow all of this to happen. It’s the British way!
Digital as opposed to analog..? Or does every adult need to have a smartphone on them all the time?? I think most countries legally require adults to be able to identify themselves with government-issued ID. Is this so novel for the UK? But I really don't get the "digital" bit...
It's quite possible that this whole digital ID thing is a red herring, to distract from recent revelations about Morgan McSweeney - who illegally took money from the Israel lobby, to fund a fake "antisemitism crisis" in Labour, with the goal of replacing Corbyn with Israel-aligned Starmer.
Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
> Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
Wow straight out of the Tory playbook (see eg Rhys-Mogg "lying [down] in Parliament" to poison search results for lying to parliament). They are so incredibly similar
> In designing the digital ID scheme, the government will ensure that it works for those who aren’t able to use a smartphone, with inclusion at the heart of its design.
I guess we'll have to wait for specifics. Unfortunately "it will have inclusion at its core" doesn't really say much.
They are considering enabling its use for more than just work, so what happens when my grandma forgets to charge her phone before her doctors' appointment?
What happens if you want to give teenagers a dumb phone because you as a parent decide a smartphone isn't appropriate, but they need the ID for the NHS too?
What of people like me who are able to use a smartphone but are unwilling to?
It's not just the elderly and homeless as mentioned on the page, but also those with religious objections, members of the digital disconnection movement, those concerned about electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and so on.
Should there a right to an offline life for the simple reason that you want live offline? A right which is protected in a few other places in Europe, at least to some extent when it concerns government services.
I don't think Kier Starmer understands that when people voted for Labour, they were, in fact, voting for Labour, not Reform / the Tories. This proposal at least has some merit (though it is not without issues) but trying to sell it as preventing illegal work is ludicrous, attempting to appeal to the right-wing votes who will never vote Labour, and giving control of the conversation to the Weasel in Chief, Nigel Farage.
Their strategy seems to be that they think their left flank is secure and they need to pull to the right to secure Tory voters who are now at a crossroads with how diminished the Tories are. Will they go to Reform? Will they go back to the Tories? The Lib Dems? It seems that Labour think some of the toughness without the undertones that Reform often has might grab them some of their voters. Maybe the implosion of Your Party gives them a feeling of more security on the left flank.
But yeah, this abandonment of the issues they traditionally represented to try and attract the soft centre right voters might not cause their traditional base to vote for the Tories. But it might send their centrists to the Lib Dems, their lefties to the Greens/SNP/etc and their "I just want change, any change" supporters to Reform. Along with increasing apathy and reducing turnout on their former core. Polling certainly seems to indicate that this is happening.
If he doesn't realise that then he probably also doesn't realise that all this dictatorship tooling he's installing is more than likely going to fall into the hands of Reform at the next election.
He'll have to live with the consequences as will the rest of us.
The voters misunderstood too. How much evidence and examples from the period of 1997-2010 did people need? All a quick google away
A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated
I don't understand why this needs to be linked to a smartphone. No issue with a national ID, but should we really shackle everything to a phone? They're already lost on the questions coming in about those who don't have one.
I genuinely think the next move will be using it as part of their age verification check. I am guessing they want it to be your online id. No more anonymous internet usage.
It is really grim what is happening to the UK. For the most part no one gives a shit. And if you do, you are automatically branded as "right wing".
And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.
Anti-migrant rhetoric used to push control that will only ever apply to citizens from the supposed party you should have voted for if you're pro-migration is wild.
There's a lot of resistance to this because people can see this is the big pill they want you to swallow. Then smaller ones can follow.
You might need digital ID recorded to buy a house. Then a car. Then eventually pretty much anything.
Any legislation allowing the State to link systems via digital ID would be unremarkable and not newsworthy, but the end result could be the Panopticon we are all dreading, or perhaps a toolkit for more hardline governments in the future.
For now, you can sign a Petition [1] against the introduction of Digital ID.
In the future, you may need to submit digital ID before signing such a petition (rather than the current email address validation).
Imagine what a tool that could be for identifying dissenters and undesirables.
This appears to just be an extension (in free app form) of the UK government “One Login” system used to get access to most government web services. This currently has about 12 million users.
Digital ID is the pattern of the mark in revelation.
Once you let go of God (worship of truth and love) the government or other totalitarian force will try to control people top down. The logical way is to identify them.
You go from a system of free will and distributed cognition to one of enforcement top down. New things can always be added to it as you don't control it. All the "problems" of the states will tag along.
Making it digital is way worse than anything before because it allow to control you without having to pay a cost in enforcement, you control the flow of money, of exchange, you let the computer control people allowing a system so top down the Nazi and communist couldn't even imagine.
Worse part, it's already there for sure but in shadow form, they have all the info about the people, it's just not tied to financial transactions and out there in the public.
1) I don't like centralised ID, its ripe for abuse.
2) I don't like the idea of crapita/accenture/G4S/some other dipshit company designing and running this.
However
if its an extension of the government gateway, then actually the only "innovation" here is the presumable fine for not keeping it up to date. (that and the smartphone integration, which I suspect is largely symbolic)
So long as its GDS rolling it out, and its properly designed (two big ifs) then in principle it could be a useful as the original GDS scheme to make government services "digital"
But, the problems of authoritarianism are not to be ignored. starmer doesn't have the bollocks to be a dictator, but jenrick and farage do. Our constitution has no guards against authoritarian capture, its just "good men" doing "good deeds". That was easily overridden with Boris. A decent majority in the House of commons gives you alomst unlimited power of the state.
Exactly, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385512 it's a question of trust and purpose; I don't trust these people, the companies behind them, the public opinion they choose to pander to, and the stated purpose of immigration enforcement.
Something similar to Estonia would be much less controversial.
When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease
"Tourism in the United Kingdom is a major industry and contributor to the U.K. economy, which is the world's 10th biggest tourist destination, with over 40.1 million visiting in 2019, contributing a total of £234 billion to the GDP"
Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.
Absolutely, calling it a ‘Brit’ card will make it wildly unpopular in certain areas let alone the headaches in terms of the common travel area and the Good Friday agreement.
>Article 1 (vi), commonly referred to as the birthright provisions, states that both governments, "Recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish, or British, or both
In Sweden we have bank id that you can optionally use as ID (new feature). But its mostly used to validate purchases, sign things, or login to banks, government websites or whatever website might use it to auth. It does not hand over all id information to the site that uses it to identify you, just name and personal number.
Quite ... a papers please moment.. if I recall correctly, South Korea has it where you have to register with the government to get an assigned username and password.
Headline (here and on Sky) is clickbait - should read that this is a PROPOSAL.
This is a proposal at a party conference, not law. Previous initiatives along these lines have not come to pass, and this is unlikely to as well.
Expect universal rejection by the tories, lib dems and reform in parliament, purely because it’s a Labour initiative, and expect plenty of Labour MPs to disobey the whip.
From the BBC this morning:
“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calls it a "desperate gimmick", while the Lib Dems fear it would force people to turn over their private data”
If it does somehow get beyond the commons, expect lords to quash it.
I give this about a 20% chance of actually coming to pass.
Digital IDs will be used to restrict your internet access.
They'll roll them out gradually. You won't need one at first. You'll still show your passport, driving license etc, until one day you give up because the digital version is convenient and you "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? Have you got something to hide?
Then they'll attack the easiest target: porn. We already have age-verification laws, implemented through dodgy third-party providers. But now everyone has digital government ID: we "might as well" unify things so all the porn sites check your age using the centralised government system. What's your problem? Why do you care? Won't you THINK OF THE CHILDREN??? You want to let CHILDREN watch PORN???
Then comes online retail. After all, the Southport killer bought his knife from Amazon — that was the front page headline on every paper, remember how organic and uncoordinated that was? It could all have been avoided with better age verification. And hey, we already have a way to verify age with our digital IDs. We "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? You want to let CHILDREN buy KNIVES?
And what about social media? Kids shouldn't use Facebook, it's bad for them. Australia already bans under 16s from social media. We already have age verification for other things. We "might as well". WHY DO YOU CARE????? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Oh, that's handy, everyone's social media accounts are now tied to their real identities. That'll come in handy when people say nasty things that the government doesn't like. After all, those riots only happened because of "misinformation". Why do you need to stay anonymous anyway? What's the problem? Why do you care? Got something to hide? You're in favour of HATE SPEECH??
The slippery slope has never been more lubricated.
My prediction is that it will soon be a requirement for all websites and apps with user-generated content to require authentication with the UK government's Digital ID OAuth provider and that requirement will include linking the user's username to their Digital ID. It won't require websites and apps to pay a third-party provider to check users' identity, so the UK government can argue that it doesn't place a disproportionately burdensome cost on smaller websites and apps.
After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.
In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.
This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.
I remember when the Internet was celebrated as decentralized media, allowing common citizens to criticize repressive regimes. Today it seems like the west is emulating the countermeasures already perfected by those repressive regimes.
"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "
Do they not already have the equivalent of a US social security card? (For the employment eligibility, not the program benefits.) Is this something much different from that?
You aren't required to show your social security card to your employer. You aren't even required to have the physical card for almost all purposes. It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
> It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
The US tried that back when Social Security Numbers were introduced. It specifically said it was for tax-purposes (a context where it might've been adequately-secure) and not to be used for anything else.
Yet without any actual penalties against "other places", it got misused everywhere by companies trying to save a buck on primary-key choice and authenticating people.
They have a couple “numbers”, but not a id “card” besides a passport (which only citizens get, not permanent residents). ID cards are pretty standard across EU.
We have a “national insurance number” used for tax purposes but it’s just a number that you fill in in forms; no-one asks to see the cards. I’m not sure they even issue the physical cards anymore? I lost mine a long time ago.
this is corny and weird. feels like cyberpunk, government run oligarchy. however, maybe this will improve the UK and stop all the illegals. about time they clean up that country. yuck
What the hell is with these overly-draconian bills prioritizing control over individual rights being passed as of late?!
The online safety act & now this. Our private right to anonymity & privacy has utterly gone out the window at this point...
I don't think this is on a par with the online safety act. That was fundamentally flawed. This isn't a huge issue and the benefits for ease of access to government services is a positive step. One thing that users of government services face is the need to provide documentation that supports their request. This can be an impediment to users accessing services that they are entitled to in a timely manner.
The biggest risk is from a data breach and this information being accessed by unauthorized parties, but that is something all online services are at risk from. The absolute worst way to implement this will be to contract it out to a third party. If it is built and maintained by civil servant developers who have already proved their mettle with a variety of govuk services then I would have confidence in it. If it is farmed out to Fujitsu or some other 3rd party then it will be an shithshow and an expensive one at that.
What’s the point of easier access if it comes at the cost of our rights?
The potential for BritCard to be used for surveillance outweighs the benefits of convenience tenfold... Privacy is not something we should compromise for easier access to services- what starts as a way to "streamline services" can quickly turn into a horrible mechanism for tracking citizens under the guise of security..
It'll be handed to Palantir. Starmer has run out of things to sell off to billionaires and the only reason this bill exists is so he can sell off the actual citizens too.
This is widely unpopular because the idea of ID cards is unpopular in general in the UK and the people also clearly understand that the argument that this would combat illegal immigration is total rubbish. Even the comments on The Guardian's website are overwhelmingly negative, which should really tell the government something.
The proposal is also drastic because it would be de facto mandatory for all residents. It's hilarious and pathetic to see the government argue that it wouldn't be mandatory, just only needed to get a job (which probably means also mandatory to rent and to study)...
> Id cards are not unpopular with the general public.
At the time of writing, 1,017,754 British people have already signed the official petition opposing them; a petition that has only been running a matter of hours.
This is HN, it is unsurprising that you will find complaints of people who think governments are icky. You know, the usual libertarian bullshit.
I lived in countries that have mandatory unique IDs, and countries that don't. Typically the countries that do not are more a pain in the ass to deal with, because institutions will proxy to the next best thing in the absense of an actual ID, typically documents that are not mandatory and not supposed to be used as ID, but end up being used like that anyway.
> - is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
> - is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
One of the countries I lived in had a system similar to this one. It worked fine
- typically you only needed this ID when opening a bank account or registered for work. Originally it was a tax registration ID (which is why it was related to banking and working), but it was secure enough that it was later repurposed as the actual unique ID. Nowadays I think they issue one to every registered person (e.g. newborns).
> - where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
We are talking about the government here, who has the monopoly of force. If you live in an authoritarian country where the government fucks over citizens, they will do it to you irrespective of you having a mandatory ID or not.
My actual main concern is the level of access private corporations have to the records tied to this unique ID. I am highly suspicious of corporations (e.g.: banks, healthcare providers, etc).
It's just so frakking disappointing for a there to finally be a huge labor landslide in 2024 then for their leaders to turn around and be ongoingly in bed just the same with right wing fascism. There was such a clear mandate for something different something better something good, and it's such a stark betrayal, such a vile repudiation than republicanism is ever going to be acceptable to see such a mass betrayal such a hard sell out. To Palantir grade fascist information overloading control that Kier would commit to. Ugly gross time line of no good. One would kind of hope winning elections might meet something better than right wing fascist over-control, but no, not here. Disgraceful.
I hope the card will include an asymmetric digital signature from a government authority. That way, concerned members of the public will be able to verify anyone else’s Brit Card.
This would in turn enable citizen-operated checkpoints to verify the Britishness of food delivery drivers, mosque worshipers, suspected pedos, anyone who smells a bit too much like curry or garlic, or blokes what look funny like they aint from round ere.
HARD eye-roll at the libertarian scaremongering about this basic, sensible idea to tame the identity mess.
* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc
* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.
* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.
The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!
This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
They would have allowed EU travel without a passport, but sadly didn't take off. Initially they would have incorporated driving licenses too - lots of people already carry a driver's license.
Ironically I've of the reasons for not having them, back in the noughties, was because it would target minorities.
Now, the right wing are beying for blood over immigration, national IDs do seems like they would reduce the ability of illegal immigrants to work/collect benefits. Tories left a massive immigration problem, exacerbated by Brexit.
A secure, optional digital ID could be useful. But not in today’s UK. Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
- Snoopers’ Charter (Investigatory Powers Act 2016): ISPs must keep a year’s worth of records of which websites you visit. More than 40 agencies—from MI5 to the Welsh Ambulance Service—can request it. MI5 has already broken the rules and kept data it shouldn’t have.
- Encryption backdoors: Ministers can issue “Technical Capability Notices” to force tech firms to weaken or bypass end-to-end encryption.
- Online Safety Act: Expands content-scanning powers that experts warn could undermine privacy for everyone.
- Palantir deals: The government has given £1.5 billion+ in contracts to a US surveillance firm that builds predictive-policing tools and runs the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform. Many of those deals are secret.
- Wall-to-wall cameras: Millions of CCTV cameras already make the UK one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
A universal digital ID would plug straight into this ecosystem, creating an always-on, uniquely identified record of where you go and what you do. Even if paper or card options exist on paper, smartphone-based systems will dominate in practice, leaving those without phones excluded or coerced.
I’m not against digital identity in principle. But until the UK government proves it can protect basic privacy—by rolling back mass data retention, ending encryption backdoor demands, and enforcing genuine oversight—any national digital ID is a surveillance power-grab waiting to happen.
I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
Was reading through your post, finding it difficult to find fault with anything you were saying, but something wasn't sitting right. And then ...
> I'm certain it's worked well in other countries
It has! In the Netherlands for example, it's just an incredibly convenient system, and if there's anything dodgy going on I'm not aware of it.
So what makes the UK so different to the Netherlands? Genuine question, because I really don't know. My only guess is that the people of the Netherlands hold their politicians to account, whereas nothing ever seems to happen to UK politicians whose corruption is so severe that they're sometimes literally criminal.
It's the difference between proportional voting vs winner takes it all. In the latter case you can't really hold politicians accountable, as you will have to choose between effectively throwing your vote away or voting for the one opposition candidate, that often will be just as bad.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.
This might be a "grass is greener" thing. Do elected representatives actually have higher approval rating, or enact policies that better fit with public opinion, under proportional systems? Sure it'd probably make things a little better, but it won't actually solve anything hard, I think. All Western countries are struggling (and mostly failing) to deal with the same problems regardless of details like electoral system.
With proportionate representation you get what _should_ happen, in my opinion, which is sometimes nothing. If the coalition can't decide on something, then it doesn't happen, which is the correct outcome because not enough people agree about it. It represents the people (who also can not agree on it).
The alternative is a decision that most people don't agree with.
My view is it's always organised elites making the decisions, no matter the system. Nominally left-wing parties often make brazen right-wing moves, and vice-versa. The votes that matter are those of the MPs, Congress members etc. which are always influenced by a range of factors and organised factions. That's the actual decision-making mechanism.
It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.
I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.
Yeah, the UK's goverment does seem to be always be run by extremely unserious people. And yeah, I also don't know why this keeps being the case. It's not unique to the UK at all (actually I think it's mostly the norm, worldwide) but perhaps not quite as much the case in the Netherlands?
I assume the main difference is the timeline of events.
It would be ignorant not to fear the ID at this point with all the other mechanisms described by OP.
The ID in itself can be a good thing. There is no evil in itself. The context however is very worrisome as it may become a tool of evil.
Classic human.
Italy has got an ID card since forever. Of course it was a piece of paper, it's a piece of plastic with a chip now. There is some experimentation to move that into the state app.
Everything accelerates when it becomes digital, for the better or for the worse. One thing that an ID does not do is preventing crime and allowing only legal jobs. People find a lot of ways to circumvent the rules as long as there are money to earn.
Very well said
The same thing is happening in Greece. The new mandatory digital ID replaces and unifies everything about citizens in one place, "to make it easier for government services to share information between each other". It can indeed be useful, but the privacy implications are enormous. Just imagine that a policeman, employer or anybody else with access to the information linked to the ID can instantly view our medical records, tax status and even simpler things like if we've ever been caught driving while drunk. Nobody knows what other information could be attached to it, but it's certain that it can be used to discriminate against us.
The worst part is that we no longer have any power to do something about it. Eventually, after it goes through the testing phase in the UK and Greece (and a few other countries where it's being implemented), this will probably roll out on a global scale, making privacy impossibly. I'm starting to get this feeling that in the next decade, we'll be living in 1984...
Before the election I was approached by a bubbly young woman who tried to persuade me to vote Labour: "No thanks, last time I did that they tried to introduce ID cards", "But that's not in our manifesto" she replied, "It wasn't the last time I voted for them either".
It gives me no pleasure to be right on this.
Could you explain what it is you find so distasteful about ID cards?
I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card', but I certainly don't want to take that out with me to prove my age.
It all depends on exactly when they're mandatory and what tracking is associated with them.
My own personal thinking has evolved on the subject since I campaigned against ID cards under Blair ("no2id"). It is a question of trust and purpose. Things like the Estonian digital identity scheme do not seem to be bad in practice. The problem comes from identity checkpoints, which serve as an opportunity for inconvenience, surveillance, and negligence by the authorities.
Remember the "computer is never wrong" Fujitsu scandal? The Windrush fiasco (itself a story of identity and records)?
And anything born of an immigration crackdown is coming out of the gate with a declared intention to be paranoid and authoritarian.
Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number -- oh, and you'll need to install this app on your phone which I promise will never be used to monitor your location, purchases, friends. Then I'll explain.
Also, please authenticate with your digital ID before posting on social media.
Not even a joke, but only a question of time.
And we never heard from then again. Case in point of how someone likes something in theory but in practice it's distasteful.
That is not a requirement though. And if it came in I would be against it. So what is your point?
Like they wouldn't bring it in to combat "mis-information" i.e. viewpoints they don't like.
Yet. This slope looks very slippery in the year of the Online Safety Act.
With your logic, everything can be used, or change to be used in a bad way, so nothing should be changed. There is never a guarantee. Seriously, is there anything which cannot be changed to be shit, in the best case to be a worthless money pit?
Edit: btw this proposal already has something which can be criticised: ID on mobile phones… so probably they’d lock everybody into a duopoly.
> Could you please give me your real name "celticninja", your phone number, your address, your NI number
The police can and will request this information from you, digital ID or not. If you have actual beef with digital ID, present it.
there's a difference between "the police can request this information from an individual" and "this information will be automatically gathered from everyone at all times and stored by the state". for one, there are circumstances in which the police are allowed to request that information and you can say "no", and there are also practical limits to the number of police that can be out requesting. The central equivalence you're trying to draw here is simply false.
They can certainly ask, but at the moment can they jail you simply for not answering?
yes. yes they can.
They'll invoke one of the more ambiguous sections, it's usually the anti-terrorism one, but sometimes is the anti-drugs one (i can't remember the numbers), and they'll detain then arrest you and haul you to the police station.
You can complain later, and maybe get some pounds out of it, but make no mistake: if the uk police wants you identified, they will identify you.
No, police cannot.
The government is pushing Digital IDs on rubbish claims (obviously won't do anything about illegal immigration). Everyone can see that.
So what does this mean about their actual aims?
Reductio ad absurdum.
Not really. British governments have always been increasingly authoritarian.
The stated reason is to stop illegals working.
Unfortunately we have an ID for working, called a national insurance number. We literally can't get legally paid without it.
So a National ID card ... Is irrelevant. You still need this number for benefits, etc.
I've got an NI number, a driving license and a passport. Not to mention a NHS number.
I don't need another form of identification to link together everything about me so my government can leak everywhere.
NI is not ID for working. It's a tax identifier.
The ID for working system is https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work , with its digital ID "share code" https://www.gov.uk/view-right-to-work
(what does the digital ID scheme add to this again?)
The share code stuff is not for nationals. It’s not clear to me exactly how it works and whether it’s scalable.
Yes, and to be paid via PAYE you need a NI number.
The prove right to work is a slightly newer thing thats additional
The nuance is that you can have a NI number, then have your visa lapse for whatever reason - you still have the NI number. Hence the requirement to prove your right to work through another means.
Previously you could use proof of British nationality or a physical biometric residence card - but they've been replaced by the digital share code system (which tbh hasn't been too bad)
No, those are still the ways of proving you have the right to work, it’s only if you’re not a national that you need the share code.
Sorry I worded that poorly - I was trying to make the point that citizens prove their right to work using passport/birth certificate, and until recently visa holders used a physical BRP, and now a digital system (which oddly enough uses your expired/redundant BRP number as a username)
>I mean if you have a passport then you already have an 'ID card',
So why do we need this digital ID then?
> to prove my age
If you want to prove your age, there are a host of *voluntary* forms of identity you can carry if you wish to do so. Please tell me how a new *compulsory* scheme (with privacy invading overreach) is going to help you.
I mean most pubs only allows passports and driving licenses. the latter has a compulsion to keep it updated.
I am quite confused by this point:
> A new digital ID scheme will help combat illegal working
If you are an immigrant you already have to prove your right to work with a share code:
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
And if you claim to be a citizen you must show a passport or birth certificate:
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work
So how exactly will this new digital ID help "stop those with no right to be here from being able to find work"?
Showing a birth certificate isn’t a particularly hard bar to pass if you want to fake that you’re a national to be fair. You need just that and a printed letter and there’s nothing an employer will do beyond copying that (afaik you can’t look up a birth certificate and check it’s valid)
You are correct and this won't help. The government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this proposal but I think people can see through it. That should really raise a red flag.
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.
How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.
In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.
The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.
It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.
> In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular.
The circular issue is quite similar to Spain. Where in order to obtain residency you need an address. But for being able to rent, most likely you’ll need a bank account and ideally a Spanish identification number. But for having a local bank account you need an address.
Similar to the above. This needs to be broken in order to get residency.
In Portugal it gets even worse, because many landlords still ask for a guarantor willing to take responsability over the rent.
My experience in a few European countries was also circular, the only thing that helped was that I could use the work contract and a letter from HR to break the cycle, however this naturally only works when the job is already secure before coming into the country.
Ditto for France, except that it's de facto illegal to rent a place without having a bank account.
AFAIK the recommended way is to open a bank account through smaller banks (aka neobanks). They just send you a card to address specified and once you activated it you (first) get a bank account for payments and (second) can use it to prove address for others. Also, if you legally rent then you get the council tax documents, though it takes roughly a month for them to send. This is another proof of address. And the bills of course, but again it takes a month or so to receive the first letter.
So it's unclear how a digital ID solves anything in regarding the proof of address.
> The banks and service providers can ask for your digital ID, the employers can ask for your digital ID and when that becomes the standart you will have very hard time to have a life in UK without having all the permissions.
They already ask you for a "share code" which they then verify on the Home Office website. What does the Digital ID add to that?
>Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them
"Once we chewed them up we spit them out"
> Most of EU and many other countries have something like that
And no EU country has any illegal immigration thanks to the ID card
/s
In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.
Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".
Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.
At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.
So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.
A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.
So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.
I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.
Never waste a good crisis
You are correct. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 was brought in by Blair’s Labour Government under the guise of preventing terrorism, the hot topic at the time. It was repealed by the incoming Tory/Liberal coalition under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Lobbying for Digital ID cards continued by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” amongst others.
While there is almost guaranteed to be an aspect of this, the UK is going through a period where immigration is in the news constantly and the populist party "Reform UK" are on the rise.
The Labour government has realised that whatever their own feelings are about people coming to the UK by irregular means and claiming asylum, they need to be seen to recognise the popular narrative right now that the boats must be stopped, and be seen to be taking action.
So I don't think the immediate state goal right here is likely to be anything deeper than desperately trying to head off Nigel Farage, who is capturing a lot of public discourse about this 'crisis'.
… except that trying to out-Farage Farage (by being bastards to asylum seekers) will lose them many of their traditional supporters (who are not big on being bastards to asylum seekers) and seems unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters (why would they take some half-hearted populist bastardry when they can have the real deal?).
The ‘small boats’ narrative is ludicrously over-reported here. It’s such a clear case of those with most of the resources scapegoating those with none of the resources as the cause of everyone else’s problems.
It’s amazing to see Labour fall for the same trick that the Tories did with Brexit, and also incredible that Farage is still a political force after all the Brexit lies.
I don't think any of that matters any more, the issue is so firmly in the public eye that Labour need to show that they've solved it whether it's a 'real' problem or not.
> unlikely to gain them many Farage supporters
Farage is polling ahead of both major parties at the moment. That support came from somewhere. To characterise all of those supporters as only interested in populist bastardry seems a bit of a surface take on the issue. Why have they turned to someone like that? Most likely they feel their own lives and prospects getting worse and in their dissatisfaction have turned to an easy answer, someone who promises to change everything and blame the outsider. To put it starkly, reductively even, you don't get nazis when everyone feels like their life is on the up and up. Well not many anyway.
The mainstream of UK politics needs to get to grips with (perceived?) worsening standards of living and failing services, and actually take action that makes people's lives better. Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air. It's not really a wonder to me that a sizeable minority are looking outside of that, or are getting frustrated that they can't get a doctor's appointment or the roads are falling apart. It's all too easy for Fartrage to say - look over there!
> Instead for decades now it has just tinkered at the edges, seemingly run by ambitionless accountants. Shuffling half a percent here, half a percent there, not really achieving very much but spewing vast volumes of hot air
Speaking from the other side of the pond, we can say quite confidently that the solution is not electing someone who will make reckless, bold moves. The brain trust here voted against “ambitionless, measured improvements” and for that, we got a chaotic circus.
we spent decades dying to "measured improvements". I don't like what my peers did about the fact that they're angry or what in particular they demanded but I don't begrudge them being angry or demanding something. You can only bullshit people about their basic living conditions for so long and long ago our political class gave up on the idea of working for people as their raison d'etre and decided instead that their job was to give us as little as it takes in order to get our votes and then use the power we give them to funnel money back to their donors. The mistake wasn't in realzing that the "left" wasn't on their side, it was in thinking that the right was just because they were the ones who pointed out how feckless, entitled and self-absorbed the center-right elitists that pass themselves off as the left had become.
Agreed, but unfortunately at times when things seem not to be going so well in general, people are prone to electing the person that promises them large positive changes by throwing out the stale old rulebook. Even if it’s not credible. Even when large parts of what’s apparently going wrong have been invented by that same bad actor…
I think this is part of why Brexit got through as well, some people felt it was a way to shake up a crusty, unresponsive establishment. That didn’t go so great!
Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.
For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.
The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.
What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.
I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.
Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.
Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.
Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?
Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
Of course a digital id doesn’t prevent illegal immigration.
Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration.
The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.
Proper border checks don't do much if people enter the country legally but overstay their visas
IDs (along with verification laws) discourage employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants, and without access to gainful employment, many will opt to return to their country of origin, or choose not to come in the first place.
You are describing the current system. Employers can receive business-ending fines (at least in theory) for hiring illegal labour. I’ve never worked a job in the UK that didn’t require me to prove my right to work here, eg by showing them my passport. Digitising the IDs will make no difference.
And frankly, if you believe this is actually about immigration then I’m embarrassed for you. Everyone can see that they’re just using the current crisis an excuse to ram through the unpopular thing that they've wanted for decades.
It won’t stop the boats.
I have never seen a report of a business ending because of a fine. I have seen reports of hospitality business having to close because they lost their alcohol licence, where the licencee employing illegal immigrants was deemed not to be a fit and proper person.
On paper, the punishment for hiring illegal labour is £45k per worker for the first offence and up to £60k for repeat offences[0]. That's enough to ruin a small business.
Whether or not these laws are actually enforced is another matter. [Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops]. But I've been asked to show ID at every job I've ever had, so companies obviously care about it even if the risk is low.
[0] source: https://www.irwinmitchell.com/news-and-insights/expert-comme...
> Insert obligatory reference to Turkish barbershops
Is the implied assertion that the majority of Turkish traders are operating illegally?
It's a popular stereotype in the UK (although it only seems to have arisen in the last year or so) that "Turkish barbershops" are a front for money laundering.
They're certainly suspicious: all across the country, high street retailers are going bust, and yet somehow all these barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints etc are staying in business, able to afford prime commercial real estate even though you never see anyone in there getting their hair cut or their nails done.
I don't know why the Turks in particular are being singled out, but that's the meme. The "American Candy Stores" in London are another famous example.
> barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints
There's an old saying where I'm from that the barbershop is the safest line of work because everyone needs their hair cut.
Where I am, admittedly in the Netherlands but I grew up in the UK and haven't noticed a huge difference, nail salons are always quite full when I pass, and I see food delivery drivers almost every time I look out the window. Similarly the barbers always seem to have clients. Could be the time of day you look?
Just going to throw it out there that it's a bit disconcerting to see these kind of criminal stereotypes associated with a certain people on HN.
My understanding is that it makes checking job eligibility easier, so enforcement of non compliance is easier.
A big source of illegal immigration is visa overstay (https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/un...), which ID can solve by tracking the visa status.
There are benefits to UK citizens, such as being easier to open a bank account and to comply with Voter ID laws.
What a lovely framing that is. Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever. Then, finally, in one of these inevitable spasms of authoritarianism, they do away with it and we're now turned away from the polling station unless we can show our permission slip.
Then they come up with even more papers for us, and the argument for it is that it's now a benefit that we can more easily comply with Voter ID laws.
Bugger off with that. Don't talk to me about any "benefit" in relation to voter ID that isn't abolishing it.
> Since time immemorial our right to vote without having to present papers was prized and protected and caused no appreciable problems whatsoever.
I don’t disagree at all, however we are where we are. The laws were introduced by a different government in a failed bid to maintain power by disenfranchising voters less likely to have ID.
That being said, we are where we are and having government-provided ID is a benefit in that context.
I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.
If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.
Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).
Except there's no obligation to have a passport.
That says if you don't you need a birth certificate and an official letter showing a national insurance number. I guess the new thing would substitute for that?
> Except there's no obligation to have a passport.
No but if you don't have it then you can't show it.
If anything it could help legal immigration. There's a bootstrapping issue where you need a utility bill to open a bank account and a bank account to get paid and get paid to pay the utility bill. And also need all 3 to rent a property to live in. You can choose the right providers to work around that with just your passport, but that involves a bit of work and research.
No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.
Presumably most legal immigrants already have bank accounts overseas and do not suffer from this bootstrapping issue.
Most companies will not pay a local employee to an international amount. You're also going to pay quite large fees for any transfers if you wanted to pay bills. Also, the account abroad is not a proof of address in the UK which is the thing you want from statements.
Good luck paying rent/utilities in the UK, or proving a UK address, with a foreign (especially non-SEPA) bank account
I have been doing so for years, never had a problem.
You have not been proving your UK address with your account abroad. You may have used it for other purposes, but not that.
I have done that once too, just changed the account address to my UK address and printed a PDF statement. No problem whatsoever.
But anyway, you can just get utilies and pay with foreign account. This gets you an utility bill.
Long time ago when I came to the UK I had that exact problem, there was only one bank (HSBC I think) that agreed to open an account for based on passport only. Even though I'm an EU citizen and UK was part of the EU at that time. Otherwise I would be stuck, because my employer (no employer I know of) would send my wage overseas.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem
It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).
It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.
Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.
Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.
Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
Every job I’ve worked in the last 10 years has asked to see my passport so they can check I’m allowed to work in this country. I expect employers who aren’t checking don’t care, and digital ID isn’t going to change this.
Yeah, and they'll accept any document you buy from the internet for 5 quid that vaguely resembles a passport.
> I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true?
Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.
> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.
I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment.
Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?
> some sort of number provided by the government
There are countries where each citizen has one unique identifier (Sweden's "personnummer", Denmark's CPR).
The UK is definitely not one of those! [yet]
Instead there are many different identifiers, each for a different purpose, and stored in different systems which almost certainly don't talk to each other.
Just for starters: NHS number for healthcare, National Insurance number for social security and pensions, Unique Taxpayer Reference for tax, Passport (with a number that changes when you renew your passport), Driving licence (with a "number"[alphanumeric] which stays constant even when you renew)...
Multiple overlapping identifiers... and I may have missed some :)
> Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like?
There is, but it's not tied to any strong identity verification process, and so there's a thriving fraud where unemployed citizens will rent out their numbers to working illegals. It's not something that the tax office has ever really worried about, since if anything it tends to increase the amount of tax paid (if several people are sharing the same tax ID they'll pay a higher tax rate), and while they might bat an eye at someone with 5 different salaried jobs it's not particularly suspicious when it's gig economy work.
To work, you need to provide a National Insurance number, which is unique and tied to certain state benefits like pension. The idea is you work, pay "national insurance" contributions and accrue "contributing years" to get a state pension later.
The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.
OK, this makes sense to me. Clearly I lacked some imagination on this whole front
There is a number for this but it’s not tied to your right to work. We have a mash of different systems.
Here’s what employers need to do currently: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
Tax numbers have no bearing at all on your right to work. If you work legally in the UK for a while then you get a national insurance number but if you then leave and your work visa expires, your national insurance number remains as an identifier.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?
It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?
Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.
During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/
Checking for right to work has been legally required for over a decade. Checks in the formal economy are now routine. Can sometimes be a nuisance, like for my friend who doesn't have a passport and his driving license was issued before those went photographic.
> Checks in the formal economy are now routine
Someone who is prepared to pay people smugglers to help them cross a border illegally may not choose to restrict themselves to working in "the formal economy".
"Illegal working and streams of taxis - BBC gains rare access inside asylum hotels"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy8ee2w73jo
> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents
For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.
Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?
That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.
So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.
I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.
Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.
I’m not sure how about illegal immigration but, coincidentally, it’s really handy for tracking people’s online activity when combined with the Online Safety Act.
You know, coincidentally.
(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)
I can think of several, which problem were you thinking of?
In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.
Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.
Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.
So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.
And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.
Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.
So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?
It doesn't solve any immigration problem at all. It's just a dumb excuse for a bunch of bullshit.
So I currently have;
A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job), drivers license and passport, one of latter is also needed (in practice) to get a job.
Why would a brit card help us reduce the number of people working illegally?
The only notable 'employers' of illegal workers in the UK are American tech firms Uber and deliveroo (doordash) because they allow driver substitution without verifying that the substitute is legit. That should be made illegal and then fine them into the ground for anyone who slips through. Brit card doesn't help and is a distraction.
>A National Insurance Card (needed to get a job)
You don't need the card itself in order to get a job, just the number. In this respect it's rather like an American social security card. (I know some US employers will ask to see the card, but that's not a legal requirement: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/SSNcard.htm)
It has nothing to do with cards and everything to do with data.
But the person you're replying to, just explained to you, how the government already have the relevant data. So it's clearly not about data, because the government already issue his NINO and passport
Edit - I mean, just play it back in your head. The PM is probably watching small boat arrivals and reform polling numbers like a hawk. And here's his idea to fix both problems, and you're saying, actually no, the PM is just doing this to get data on where I go to work, even though they already have my PAYE details
I guess the guy above is right. It is about the data and the right to use your face and track you everywhere. This can be easily paired with that UK bonkers camera ai thing. They might not need to know who is illegal, but if the camera does not know you, you might need to explain yourself and show an id.
At the same time, I wonder how will they deal with people wearing burkas, masks, balaclavas etc
Government already have my photo for passport and driver's license, I struggle to believe that there's people here working who don't have at least a provisional license or passport of any kind.
Maybe they plan to ask Uber and deliveroo to authenticate the workers via facial recognition?
In order to drive a motorcycle or car you need a driving license which has photo ID?
Ok maybe you deliver by push bike.. but if you arrived here legally you will have a passport? If you didn't you ergo don't have the right to work here?
Outsourced to companies that don’t share data, which is why the government is requiring you to submit more data. How hard is this? Eventually they’ll have your DNA, Fingerprints, photos, family trees, employment history, money, spending habits, vices, travel locations, conversations, and your comings and goings via license plate readers.
Welcome to your future.
I think it's 100% about the data.
I beleive that Labour see this new ID system as the solution to all the age verification questions now required by the Online Safety Act. e.g. access to things like Reddit, BlueSky messaging, Spotify.
With that in mind I think new data you're talking about will be enhanced tracking and monitoring on everyday online activity of UK citizens.
I don't think it is only online. It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
I honestly understand the problem with immigration, but at the same time, I think this way of approaching the problem is just to create "the enemy" from 1984.
It seems that immigrants right now move something between 4B-10B a month in UK which is not a small number. Considering the costs elsewhere altogether, it seems quite small win for the risk.
>It is really a distopean future in US and UK right now.
This ignores the fact that most of Europe and Asia already have national IDs
We all have national ID’s. It’s about having digital ID’s in a system they control.
I tend to agree, that or a big distraction/white elephant/dead cat.
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.
Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work
> A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - paper birth certificate is also acceptable, as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
This policy would absolutely sail through, with no controversy at all, if it had just been "free passports for all" reusing all the existing rules, existing IT and existing bureaucracy; and "Optional digital passport on your phone" for those who want that.
Why they're doing this in the most expensive, unpopular way possible - I have no idea.
How are the consulting companies supposed to make money with that kind of attitude?
I appreciate that, I decided to exclude it for simplicity because obviously not everyone working here was born here :)
I don't really understand why I need a Fourth (or Fifth)! National ID?
I don't really get the point on reporting number, true, but it's also a UID linked to a passport or birth certificate.
You don't currently have any National ID. You have forms of ID, which others might not have, but none are national mandatory ID that every citizen and resident has. As such many benefits in streamlining and simplifying processes cannot be achieved when everyone has a UID as such. Imagine making a system where you used various ID formats, and you couldn't guarantee anyone had one in particular, and some people had none.
Your NI card literally says it's not identification. A NI number is not linked to a passport as it's not mandatory to have a passport, so that would not work for many people. It is just a number used for tax accounting.
Ok then 'Government issued [photo] ID' so what if it's not a 'national ID'? They have all the data they need to tackle this. You can't get a NI number without proving who you are, if the government don't trust NI numbers (which they are minting?) then they could simply re-issue them? That would be far far easier than a new national ID.
>You can't get a NI number without proving who you are
That's not true either. You're sent your NI number just before 16 years old without providing anything.
Also, an NI number is just a number. There is no photo. How can you look at it and say it belongs to the person presenting it? And no you can't look up a passport or something in another system based on the NI number, because those other IDs aren't mandatory so the person might not have them.
The only way to really ID someone is to have mandatory photo ID, whether that be digital or not.
How do you think HMRC know to send you a card? If they're giving them out like smarties to foreigners then they could simply... Not (a British person gets one as a function of having a birth certificate)
Now that ID is required for voting, it's reasonable that the government provides a form of ID, for free, to all citizens. Passports cost money and not everyone has one. Same for driving licenses. It should also streamline other government services.
I think it would be simpler to repeal the ID requirement for voting. I don't believe there is any evidence of widespread voting fraud, so it adds unnecessary cost. I certainly wouldn't try to sell the ID as preventing illegal work, which is obviously ludicrous.
Passports cost money yes, but introducing a Brit card won't?
> There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it - but digital ID will be mandatory as a means of proving your Right to Work.
So it's mandatory for everyone except old people and the unemployed. It will almost certainly also be mandatory for renting, which has the same check. Then it will gradually seep into everything else: benefits and pensions, to cover the categories not initially covered. Then police spot checks and ICE sweeps.
This isn't the USA, ICE doesn't exist here.
We have the border force, and they aren't allowed to cover their faces, yet.
But to your point, its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it.
The other thing is that driving licenses are also ID, that carry a £10k fine for not keeping your address up to date.
> its required to have some sort of ID for renting, job or voting _already_ the difference here is there is a digital version of it
It's strange how last time I campaigned against ID cards 25 years ago, none of those requirements were in place. Voter ID in particular is a very recent idea imported from the US (and of course doesn't apply to postal votes, where there are actually real concerns about security and diversion).
It will eventually be required for everybody except the wealthy.
Just like nearly everybody's medical privacy has been given away in the UK.
Like nearly everybody's rights are unenforceable because they can't pay the enormous costs of a court action.
British freedom is great if you can afford it.
Please stop Americanizing the UK. ICE does not exist in the UK.
Stasi, Gestapo, ICE. You know what they meant. The UK just doesn't have the equivalent aggressive immigrant-removal operation in place yet.
> and ICE sweeps
Sorry old boy, but what have the *UK* Institute of Civil Engineers got to do with this?
The best way to win an argument is to mix and unrelated match facts… I mean, unless someone notices…
okay but the best way to win a tennis match is to score an unrelated match point
Using the name of the US body to associate it with the immigration sweeps carried out in an abusive manner; the corresponding UK immigration raids are currently the responsibility of the Home Office.
Presumably they have their own British acronym and don’t need to borrow one from the US.
> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.
Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?
This is the most alarming aspect of the proposal to me. I find it wild that the government will require me, by law, to buy an expensive electronic device I don't want or otherwise need, in order to be employed. It's absolutely amazing to me that the government is forcing me to spend money in this way.
They've already said you won't need a mobile phone. They mention phones as a deliberate distraction from the fact that they will be building a huge central database.
I will be very surprised if the app does much more than dish up a pre-signed chunk of ID data, much like an e-passport does now. It won't actually need a secure device.
(Which isn't to say they will support anything except android and iphone.)
They have said it will work for people who "aren’t able to use a smartphone". Nothing is said about people who are able but unwilling. I can only assume I will forced to submit to the terms and conditions of a foreign corporation, and forced to use non-Free software.
Is there any particular reason why a UK central identity database is bad, while the French and Spanish central identity databases aren't a problem?
Having just paid a small fortune to renew my passport. I'm not super excited about this, especially as I live outside the UK.
I also don't trust them not to make a complete hash of all this, removing all potential utility while simultaneously increasing the chances of my ID being stolen.
sigh
As an American it seems to me that the UK government insists on finding a way to upset all sides on any given issue like illegal immigration. If anything it's the singular and unique skill of Whitehall.
A good compromise leaves everyone mad.
A good compromise leaves everyone dissatisfied. A bad deal leaves everyone mad.
like IPv6
whats wrong with ipv6? other than square brackets
To be fair though, complaining about 'things' is practically a British national sport.
I'm not clear if this is digital ONLY or if I people can choose to carry a physical card when required, instead of a smartphone.
If it's the former, then it means it's now mandatory for all British citizens to become customers of the Google/Apple duopoly LOL
And "become customers" means it will become mandatory to sign away your rights to a foreign corporation by agreeing to their terms of service. This kind of abuse of power is a clear example of why the UK needs a real constitution.
And if Google bans you for some reason (which they have been known to do sometimes), I guess you'll be kicked out of the country unless you buy an iPhone.
The UK has a real constitution. A central side of it is HRA 1998 which Tory/Reform want to do away with because it curtails power of government.
A real constitution is not a vague collection of traditions. Every other country understands "constitution" to mean a written document. A collection of traditions cannot meet the primary aim of a constitution, which is granting people clear and unambiguous rights.
Furthermore, a constitution is generally more difficult to change than a law. The Human Rights Act can be repealed by a simple majority of MPs voting to repeal it.
I didn't watch the video, but have read other reports, and it's worth noting that the context for this is the Labour Party conference, which starts on Sunday. The UK govt are under pressure from the tories and Reform to do something about people entering the UK from France by crossing the channel in small boats. Nothing much seems to be working. So this announcement is about trying to control the narrative by making a big, distracting announcement. I'd mlbe surprised if many people in the government/police/civil service expect it to make a difference.
Also, seems to be intended to be mandatory and require a smartphone. Hows that going to work?
Also, what happens when the database is inevitably stolen?
The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.
I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.
Depends on if you are looking at this in terms of numbers of people or cost. The Home Office annual spend on processing asylum seekers has ballooned from just under £1 billion to near £5 billion in the space of 5 years, which is 1/3 of the estimated £14 billion raised from the unpopular National Insurance increase.
This does indeed seem like a crazy high number.
Even then, what fraction of all asylum seekers comes via small boats, vs other means? I believe the UK is entirely within its right to send small boats asylum seekers back to France, since it is a safe country. International conventions on asylum seekers state this - you are not entitled to drive thru the whole of Europe then demand asylum specifically in the UK.
I don't want to come across as uncaring, I'm sure there are tragedies that drive people to doing this, that doesn't mean the UK has to also mismanage the process on its side.
From what I've read, about 1/3 of all asylum seekers over the last 7 years arrived via small boat crossings.
Looking forward though, about 90% of those arriving in small boat crossings are currently going on to seek asylum and the average annual cost of supporting an asylum seeker during their claim has risen to an estimated £41k, so for ~30k arrivals this year, the financial cost of not processing these claims promptly could increase that overall annual bill further still.
Also, in the first year of processing, costs may be drawn from the overseas aid budget (which was recently shrunk). This results in possibly 1/5 of the overseas aid budget being used for costs associated with processing asylum claims, which perhaps doesn't match most people's expectations as to what overseas aid should be used for.
I think that's why even though the number of people involved in these crossings is small compared to net migration, it has a big financial impact.
The UK was indeed part of treaty system that meant other states had to "take back" asylum seekers that traveled through them to the UK, but it decided it was in its best interest to quit that a few years ago, so France is a lot less motivated to do that now.
Uhm are you sure about those numbers?
0.8m is like on the average a whole county in the UK, and such massive influx would destroy the housing- and job market. Not to mention pressure on schools and healthcare.
Exactly, this is what I am saying. The 0.8-1m number is the legal, net migration into the UK, very significant, and adding to the downsides people associate with immigration. It's not all downsides etc etc but still.
The 37k small boats migration is very small in comparison. Plus there's illegal immigration not via small boats - overstayed visas etc.
Hence my point that the overfocus on small boats crossings seems misplaced to me.
What do you think is happening to those markets?
The actual number is like half of that because while 800k people came, about 400k people left.
I am an immigrant myself but I start to think that such policies are short-sighted. The end result is often fragmentation of the society, because immigrants rarely truly integrate, and at some point they become the majority, and then you're effectively a minority in your own country. It takes at least two generations for newcomers to become fully integrated, and that assumes things going right.
The migration numbers are net so I believe this is arrivals minus departures (or someone has a very weird definition of net).
“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work.
They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.
What are the options legally available to them? They have their own experts, but it sounds like you have a novel idea that hasn't occurred to anyone before.
> legally
They're the ones who make the laws?
I love how Brits take laws/rules so seriously but spend absolutely no time thinking _about_ the rules. How they're made, 2nd order consequences etc
The larger problem is 10 times as many arrive via Heathrow. That’s what causes the pressure on local services, from housing to GPs to transport.
Legally and morally? What is your solution?
Stick them in processing centres until they can be deported. Send a clear message to anyone who might come that it won't work, you won't get in, we won't give you anything, don't risk your life or waste your money.
Australia did exactly this (in the face of howling opposition) and it worked: illegal boat arrivals dropped from ~20,000 per year to almost zero. Thousands of people used to drown attempting the crossing, now no-one drowns. There's your moral case.
Legally, Parliament is sovereign. If the current legal framework doesn't allow it, change the law. Except they won't, because they don't want to solve the problem and they use the law as an excuse as if they aren't the fucking government.
I'm genuinely wondering how harsh you'd be willing to be to get what you want.
What would you do if an individual can't be deported because no country will accept them? Or if their country of origin is likely to kill or torture them? Or if no commercial carrier is willing to risk operating to that country? Would you be willing to deport unaccompanied children with no guarantee that they'd be cared for?
All the more reason for them to stay in France.
The humane option is still available. It’s not too late to take it. But if you keep refusing it, don’t complain when you get something else.
Its not clear what your "humane option" is. Care to explain?
This is a perniciously xenophobic take, tbh. Who are you to decide your values are objectively better than theirs? /s
There is a village A dragon comes to the village every year. In exchange for 2% of the children, it spares the rest and promises its “magical” protection from unseen enemies. This arrangement has lasted 2,000 years. Most villagers worship it, even though the custom has left their village far worse off than others in the land.
Some villagers move away. Not all of them are dragon-worshippers, but some are and they still try to summon the dragon.
Now the dragon free villagers face a choice:
Keep them out. But that means some innocent children among them will die.
Let them in. Risk the cult spreading again inside the walls and possibly bringing the dragon back.
Go kill the dragon themselves. Accept substantial casualties including innocent dragon worshippers and some of their own people.
Killing the dragon would mean temporarily brutal treatment of the worshippers and the destruction of their culture, but it would spare future generations from an unbounded amount of suffering.
I'm really not sure what point you're making here. What is the "dragon" in irregular migration. What is the "village"?
People already work illegally. They get paid cash, off the books. New forms of ID won't stop this.
I don't think the point is to eliminate all illegal work.
But the new form of ID makes work place checks real easy and fast.
Add a real hefty fine for the owner and possibly ban from conducting any form business for a few years, that will have undoubtedly have effect.
I don’t see why they can’t augment and phase in a new National Insurance ID which has photo on it rather than introducing some new system…
Unless of course this new system is for some other unclear purpose.
What info is on this ID that they don't already have access to?
Not from the UK so i don't know how much more they're asking for
I won't hold my breath. It'll take 5 times longer than planned, cost 10 times more, won't do everything it originally set out to do, then won't work on the tech that everyone will have when finished, and a future government will decide they don't like it and will start over.
I feel like governments worldwide are perennially musing “what if we could know what everyone is doing, all the time?”
This is a natural and unfortunate consequence of crime and foreign aggression getting increasingly borderless. As the world gets smaller, and as more and more of the world's population knows about the outside world, the more badness we face.
Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.
Perhaps the better solution is to stop opening up and make a concerted effort to return to a high-trust society, rather than destroy privacy and go full authoritarian polite-state?
Or must we absolutely must accept eg every Nigerian, Pakistani, Syrian, Afghan, Indian etc who has a fleeting desire emigrate, else our society will collapse?
Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants? How big is it compared to, for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
Or are those things somehow related? I would be crazily scared to know that immigrant care workers will leave NHS as most hospitals relies on them. The government already made clear they won't pay people more nor will give more benefits for NHS workers and I am quite sure not Brits will take those spots when Tesco express pays more for less hours of work with more benefits.
>Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants?
This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000. Those elected have consistently ignored them which has raised tensions.
In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.
>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?
The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.
I think there's some conflation happening here (not necessarily from the above comment).
Those figures relate to general immigration, which wouldn't be affected by ID schemes since people are given approval by the government to arrive and work in the UK. If the government wanted to reduce regular immigration, it could just decide to award less visas.
The ID scheme would only affect irregular immigration which is much lower (approx 50,000 a year by the governments stats, obviously hard to know how accurate that is, but much lower than 1 million[0]).
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
If you look at the countries that are lauded at having the best online government services. They all have some type of digital ID.
Having something like that is imo. a cornerstone for building out top notch digital governmental services, and I don't fault the UK for trying to get this in place.
That being said, I'm not convinced it will be that much of a blocker for illegal workers. I'm sure they will find a way around it.
It's incredibly misleading to call a phone app a "card". This is much worse than it sounds. Am I going to be forced to buy a smartphone? Am I going to be forced to run non-Free software? Am I going to be forced to enter into a restrictive contract with a foreign corporation?
Hah this is the UK. No, it'll be optional to begin with to make people like you asking important questions seem like a whacko. Then once they use propaganda to make people opt into it, and it reaches mass adoption, then it'll quietly be made mandatory - or extremely annoying not to have it
No, it will be mandatory right from the start, and employers will be required to check it
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/digital-id-ca...
"Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said ID cards were not in the party's election manifesto and added: "That’s not our approach.""
– July 2024
"Asked about the possibility of introducing digital ID cards, Mr Reynolds [then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, now Chief Whip] told Times Radio: "We can rule that out, that's not something that's part of our plans.""
– July 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87rgj4e0rzo
In addition to all the issues mentioned in the article, this seems to mean that UK citizens will effectively be forced to accept the terms of service of one of two US companies (Apple or Google). If you must have either an Android or iOS device to run this digital ID app (which presumably will be distributed via the Play Store on Android), there's no other option!
(This was originally a comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45387509. We merged that thread hither and added https://www.theverge.com/news/786323/uk-digital-id-plans-man... to the top text.)
For me a big red flag is that the government is using deceit and dishonesty to push this: "in an effort to crack down on illegal migrant workers" is complete, transparent rubbish.
Of all the things there are to complain about these ID cards, I don’t think this is the one to choose.
Starmer has been ambivalent on ID cards (at least compared to Blair, who must think Xmas has come twice this year). Really the only reason this is being introduced is because it lets Labour look like they’re trying to tackle illegal immigration/employment/benefits-claiming.
Reform (led by Trump’s mini-me) is making political progress hand over fist by casting immigration as the root of all evil. I’m pretty certain this is Labour’s response. They don’t want the populist (otherwise known as “batshit insane”) policies Reform are proposing (“end all immigration, send all immigrants back home”) - but a more-moderate “you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits” seems on-message to me.
So for once it might just be ok to take a politicians word at face value. This doesn’t preclude nefarious use later on, of course…
If that's Labour's response to Reform UK then it is the most ill-thought-out, if not idiotic, possible:
There is a real issue with immigration in the UK.
People want actual action on immigration, not gimmicks, not lies. The Conservatives were annihilated because their voters caught up with the fact that they were lying (talking tough while actually pushing immigration higher).
Those Digital IDs would do nothing against illegal immigration considering existing right to work and right to rent legal checks. It is clear and people see it, so see previous point. "you need to prove you’re entitled to work/live here/claim benefits" is already the case and has always been the case. He is copying the disastrous Conservative strategy to talk tough while doing nothing and in fact actually keeping immigration up.
There have been previous attempts to introduce ID cards. People have always been generaly against them and the most against them are probably those already supporting Reform UK or the libertarians on both sides. So he's only eroding the little support he has left (progressist liberals) while strengthening the opinion of those already against him. I was looking at the readers' comments on The Guardian and there are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal. So if even them turn against Starmer he is well and truly toast.
In case you are wondering if only the UK is working on this... buckle up:
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
I don't understand how people are able to work in the UK illegally without employers already breaking the law. Employers are required to pay payroll taxes for their employees and you need a national insurance number for the employee to do this. I'm not sure how this fixes something that should already be fixed.
Not just that but there's already the "share code" system that's used to verify status against the Home Office.
This smells a lot of "think of the children" [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
didn't they try that 20 years ago and repeal? and back then it was voluntary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.
I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"
Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.
I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.
The MPs never read anything. You got sent back one of a few pre-written replies by a secretary. I was stupid enough to reply to one of those replies once and never got anything back.
This is just wishful thinking. They're not going to make all of the farm workers, many of whom have difficulty reading ANY language (let alone English), download an "app" and install it on their phone.
"In 2024, a significant portion of the UK adult population, approximately 8.5 million people (1 in 6), struggles with reading and writing at a basic level, according to The Reading Agency's 2024 report"
Maybe they'll have an exception for people who are more migratory in nature. In that event, I think we'll get to see a nice real-world example of a cyberpunk-style dystopia. "High tech, low life". The upstanding citizens will be surveilled, preyed upon by corruption, and will be running on a social credit score treadmill designed to work them to death. Meanwhile, a plucky band of rebel farm workers, who are free to work outside the system, will bring down the establishment and bring freedom to all. Roll credits.
I just wonder how widespread fraud is without any form of ID. A fake utility bill is just a few clicks away on my PC.
Govt surveillance? I'm much more worried by the ever increasing number of cameras in the streets rather than something similar to having a passport to prove who you really are.
What's the benefit of this over a passport? A passport is a physical thing, so you don't need to have a phone to be able to use it, proves who you are with the same details as this digital ID, and will probably require a similar amount of paperwork to get hold of
You usually don't want to carry a passport with you at all times. In some European countries (e.g., the Nordics), you have your ID, driver’s license, firearm license, etc., all in a government app that can be verified with an app used by officials. You can also sign and authenticate all paperwork with the same system
I use my passport to verify my right to work in the US during the first week of my job, and then I don't bring it any other time. So unless you're changing jobs very frequently it shouldn't be necessary to carry all the time. A bigger issue would be that many people do not have passports.
Good for them, but I don't see why we need this, or indeed why that's a good thing?
Easy and cheap regular checks on the spot presential or/and online, as frequently as you want vs rare scheduled difficult and expensive checks.
Possibilities get realised such as regular remote checks (ie selfie to prove you are the id owner holder, address proof, etc, flagging odd id holder behaviour or employer, etc). Currently, you cannot do this, no visibility into who works where and where that person even resembles the person meant to be working for [insert gig company].
I do selfie to prove I match my driver's license all the time (needed for app based banks, and so on)?
The government absolutely knows where I work, are you joking? That's what NI numbers are for. You seriously think there isn't a join table in a government database with my NI number and passport number?
There are other workers in the UK aside from you. The policy affects them too not just you. You are getting the business requirements wrong. You are unlikely to be the main reason for the policy. Folks getting paid under minimum wage such as some gig workers using someone else's identity are the main target.
If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Who exactly are we solving for?
> If they arrived here legally won't they have a passport? Or national photo ID at the very least? If they are driving for Uber or deliveroo then they'll have a driver's license too? If they don't have either (or a UK birth certificate) then it's safe to say they're not a legit citizen?
Simple. Overstaying or/and expired passport will lead to that. Valid status is not a fixed binary state. It is better described as a function of personal id, rights docs and current time. Currently, the checks are more akin to updating a Boolean column on rare occasions. Digital id countries do checks more like function calls that you can perform easily and quickly
RTW already requires ID plus NI, but OK what about if we just said 'free passports' and then said passport or driving licence plus NI is needed to get a job here. If you have a foreign passport and no UK driving licence then yes you'll have to keep that up to date in order to work here, c'est la vie.
To the extent this is technically possible, if the gig economy companies wanted to do this, they could do it already.
When the driver signs up, check their passport or driving license in the normal manner, and take a matching portrait you keep on file. Any time you want to, compare a selfie to the portrait on file.
Reason they don't do this is it's profitable to hire people who can't legally work in the UK, if they can get away with it - and the government lets them get away with it.
I would trust the Nordic governments to write an app to put on my phone and not slurp up all my data and spy on me with it. I can't say the same about the British government
Denmark is the largest supporter of Chat Control
agree, seems pointless
Can't use your passport online. In Sweden we have bank id, its used for everything from validating purchases, logging in to banks, government or other websites, to sign documents, get a loan, etc. To get it you would need to go to a bank and present a proper ID, the ones using bank id for auth or otherwise only get your name and personal number.
One of the problems the UK has is that our two primary government IDs – driver licenses and passports – are not universally issued. Instead, these IDs have requirements and must be applied for at a cost, so not everyone has one.
This means when you want to implement things like the Online Safety Act you basically have to implement alternatives to ID verification like age estimators which isn't ideal (for the government anyway).
With a digital ID anonymous age estimators will no longer be required, so when someone is trying to watch porn or view footage of a political protest they'll have to identify who they are instead of using a fake AI face.
They don't have any real benefit over passports expect for the fact that a passport is a selectively issued document which not everyone living and working in the UK has access to or has applied for, but with digital IDs everyone will have one so there will no excuse to not identify yourself any time the government wants you to.
Missing the point.
A passport is the universal identity document. It's way too valuable to carry around and expediting a new passport is costly and slow. Checks need to be done in person and the passport holder needs to be told in advance about the check (so impromptu checks don't work and expired passports get through, also catching fake passports and the like is hard).
A digital ID as its name says is digital, checks can be done remotely (as often as you want) in a secure environment with physical checks possible in addition to that. Regular and unscheduled checks are possible with a digital id after the initial check both presential and remote. Online checks especially can cover for things like the same id being used in multiple places, it also means employers cannot fudge it as the actual repository of truth lies online. None of this is possible with a passport.
Citizen IDs and more recently digital IDs have been used in Europe for decades now. Having a redundant piece of ID is incredibly valuable.
The fact that the UK doesn’t allow “impromptu checks”, otherwise known as “Papers please!” is not a bug, it’s a feature that distinguishes our democracy from other states and we are pretty proud of it.
There is nothing undemocratic about checking whether you are compliant with employment regulations on a regular manner anymore than it is to check whether your gas installation is compliant with gas regulations or your voting registration is compliant with voting policy. It is completely orthogonal. You might not be in favour of a policy but that does not mean that the policy is undemocratic.
And in a situation where that is warranted (e.g. a traffic violation), you should probably have some form of proof of identification on you anyway
In the UK you do not have to have your drivers license upon your person when driving a car. Usually you'll be instructed to present it to a nearby police station within a few days.
Not required by law in the UK to have ID on you while driving. Works well enough (you have to produce it at a station within 7 days). I'm sure if it's serious enough, the police can force some other method
In the UK all cars have number plates front and rear, so that's covered already.
That unfortunately can, and will change.
In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.
Do you believe these russian and chinese bots are walking the streets, where an 'impromptu check' by a policeman would stop them?
Or are you saying this electronic ID card will be linked to people's twitter accounts, to better police speech online?
Sorry but my own corrupt politicians and ruling business class are doing far more damage to my country than Russian ad Chinese bots.
The government has been able to do checks on me using my passport number etc, like when I was getting my provisional driving license, so somewhere there is a digital version of it on a government server or something. Can't they just make that information available?
What impromptu checks would you need this ID for? The use cases I've seen for it are to make sure you are legal to work, and when renting a house, both of which are circumstances that you can be told about beforehand
That is not what I mean. Doing checks using your passport number is not good enough . It only proves that you someone used your passport number for a job. It doesn't prove it's you. It doesn't prove that you didn't swap with someone else (worker proxy). A digital id is a token fully controlled that opens compliance possibilities that are not possible or financially feasible by using just a passport number because the government does not control the passport numbers of everyone (especially those for which this policy is intended).
Think: the ability to verify that the id owner's face resembles the face of the id holder. The ability to check that the id owner address matches that of the id holder. The ability to flag employers containing id owner employees regularly failing those checks. The ability to do this regularly without previous notice to the id owner at national scale remotely or in person is a level of compliance you will never get even halfway with just using a passport number.
The driving license application page pulled up my photo from giving it my passport number. That photo of me proves that I am the owner of that passport. I recently gave my work my passport information to prove that I was legal to work there. If we need a new system to prove that I am legal to work there, then how was it good enough to use my passport for that?
I’ve always lived in places where having an ID on you has been part of your “citizen responsibilities”. So reading the post my feeling was “oh cool, they’re getting a new eID-like system”. But I imagine it’s a huge step if folks could get by without an ID at all.
In this case, sounds like you'll not just be required to carry an ID. Everyone in the country will be legally required to carry an Android phone or iPhone.
Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store. Pretty vague so far.
In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.
At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.
And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.
So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.
The counterpoint to this is obviously that the requirement to present ID to vote is tantamount to voter suppression - iirc there is no “free” form of ID in the UK.
As an ex-Brit I am also used to carrying an ID and a drivers license, and I’ve always found it quite weird that you can’t get an ID card of any kind that isn’t a full-fledged passport or a drivers license.
I mean I guess this new thing is going to be free?
I also don't live in the UK any more, still a brit and not yet Australian, but I have had to adjust to it being necessary to carry your license here when driving. It means I can't really leave home without my wallet, which is odd. We're getting electronic licenses before long though, hopefully.
Honestly no idea. Hopefully! And hopefully you’ll be able to vote with it.
I just have a magnetic wallet on the back of my iPhone with the two cards and my travel card, so I always have them. I don’t carry a physical payment card or cash so don’t need a wallet otherwise
One needs a "National Insurance" number (NINO) to work legally.
I thought it was also required to collect any type of government benefit too.
The UK did have compulsory ID cards, which needed to be carried at all times, during both World Wars.
That is very surprising. In the US, you are legally required to carry your license when driving. If you are caught driving without one, expect to be arrested.
Also the US reserves the right to demand ID if you're within 100 miles of a border - which is effectively 2/3 of the population. And detain you until your status can be "verified", however long that could take.
That should only be for non-citizens, but I have no idea how you could prove that without documentation in the first place.
So for the vast majority of Americans, you probably have to be carrying ID at all times anyway, else you risk someone deciding you "might" not actually be a citizen.
If this same rule was enacted in the UK, there would be no place on the British Isles that would be excluded, as nowhere is more than 100 miles from the coast.
In France you have to carry a state issued ID regardless of your location within the country. Driving license might be asked to be provided if there is an assumption you have one. A lasting legacy of the 40s.
In practice the pseudo-crime of being "suspicious looking" also requires ID. Good luck if you want to argue your constitutional rights. Immigration status is topical for the current era. Something as benign as walking up the street to pickup takeout could involve identifying yourself to the police and waiting for them to clear you for warrants.
The UK used to be a high-trust society.
In my state I have an app on my phone for it. I only use my physical card to get into bars.
That hasn’t been my experience, perhaps it’s state to state. I’ve been stopped without ID and had no problem. I’ve even boarded a plane through TSA without my license.
We already have multiple forms of identification. The National Insurance number, passports and photo ID such as driving licences, which we must provide when starting employment.
If you're not from Britain, you must present evidence of your right to work or other documentation. This is already the law.
Any company that does not follow this is violating the law.
In reality, most illegal workers are engaged in cash-in-hand jobs that never require ID. A digital ID alone will not solve this problem.
Adding a digital ID won't make any difference.
We've also seen similar issues with the UK's attempt to censor adult content "to protect children." It sounds reasonable on the surface (no child should have open access to the internet!). Still, the law was written so broadly that even community clubs involving children with no relation to adult content were caught in its provisions.
Threatened by fines and bureaucratic red tape, many closed their doors. International sites that had no idea what to do - now block the UK. And did this stop access to explicit content? No. Anyone can use a VPN, or an anonymity-oriented browser like Brave and use a Tor tab to bypass the blocks completely. For the non-technical, how long before these Age ID check services, which the government wants everyone to use (private companies owned mainly by adult companies), are hacked and everyone's viewing habits are released?
How long before we're required to use our Digital ID to log on to the internet, enabling monitoring of everything we browse?
A more innovative approach would be for ISPs to by default integrated parental controls on residential connections, something that has been technically possible for decades. In fact, any mobile phone contract in the UK operates similarly. Why not home internet? This isn't about new legislation; it's about education.
Parents already understand why they shouldn't give alcohol or tobacco to their children; why not teach them how to protect their children online?
The new NHS app and driving licence app are expected to be available by the end of 2025. How long before they're integrated into a single system where the government maintains one massive database containing every individual's driving information, medical records, browsing history, banking and tax details? It's not far-fetched to imagine such overreach occurring.
Also as of this week, HMRC (our UK tax office) also now has the right to raid any UK bank account for taxes owed (leaving only £5,000 in the account). This applies to both individuals and companies. Consider a company that becomes insolvent days before paying salaries how will they pay their workers? Some companies have already become insolvent after paying wages while still owing taxes and National Insurance. Just HMRC now get their money and the employees won’t.
I realise there are several loosely connected points above, but that's precisely the problem: all these developments have emerged over the past 18 months.
So when the UK government claims these measures are "for the people," the argument falls flat.
It's difficult to believe that policymakers don't recognise these fundamental flaws.
This raises the question: what's the real motivation? To me, it seems less about protection and more about monitoring and control, implemented by people too afraid to speak against their superiors.
At nearly 50, I see a UK very different from the one I was born into. One thing I know for sure: once this process begins, it will only worsen, and a new government will maintain these systems and extend them further. We left Europe - but kept every single law! As a nation, we just allow all of this to happen. It’s the British way!
Digital as opposed to analog..? Or does every adult need to have a smartphone on them all the time?? I think most countries legally require adults to be able to identify themselves with government-issued ID. Is this so novel for the UK? But I really don't get the "digital" bit...
It's quite possible that this whole digital ID thing is a red herring, to distract from recent revelations about Morgan McSweeney - who illegally took money from the Israel lobby, to fund a fake "antisemitism crisis" in Labour, with the goal of replacing Corbyn with Israel-aligned Starmer.
Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
> Some of the digital ID proposal documents published by UK gov even bear the "Labour Together" stamp - Labour Together being the Israel-aligned "think tank" that McSweeney used for the illegal funds!
Wow straight out of the Tory playbook (see eg Rhys-Mogg "lying [down] in Parliament" to poison search results for lying to parliament). They are so incredibly similar
One of my concerns with this is the assumption that every adult has a suitable smartphone. Do the government plan to hand them out?
A smartphone running software beholden to one of two American companies.
Do you see the flaw here!
From the linked page:
> In designing the digital ID scheme, the government will ensure that it works for those who aren’t able to use a smartphone, with inclusion at the heart of its design.
I guess we'll have to wait for specifics. Unfortunately "it will have inclusion at its core" doesn't really say much.
They are considering enabling its use for more than just work, so what happens when my grandma forgets to charge her phone before her doctors' appointment?
What happens if you want to give teenagers a dumb phone because you as a parent decide a smartphone isn't appropriate, but they need the ID for the NHS too?
The technologically inept get QR codes tattooed on their foreheads.
It won't fit on my head next to my POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattoo.
Please don't give them ideas!
What of people like me who are able to use a smartphone but are unwilling to?
It's not just the elderly and homeless as mentioned on the page, but also those with religious objections, members of the digital disconnection movement, those concerned about electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and so on.
Should there a right to an offline life for the simple reason that you want live offline? A right which is protected in a few other places in Europe, at least to some extent when it concerns government services.
A smartphone is going to be mandatory for employment!
I don't think Kier Starmer understands that when people voted for Labour, they were, in fact, voting for Labour, not Reform / the Tories. This proposal at least has some merit (though it is not without issues) but trying to sell it as preventing illegal work is ludicrous, attempting to appeal to the right-wing votes who will never vote Labour, and giving control of the conversation to the Weasel in Chief, Nigel Farage.
Their strategy seems to be that they think their left flank is secure and they need to pull to the right to secure Tory voters who are now at a crossroads with how diminished the Tories are. Will they go to Reform? Will they go back to the Tories? The Lib Dems? It seems that Labour think some of the toughness without the undertones that Reform often has might grab them some of their voters. Maybe the implosion of Your Party gives them a feeling of more security on the left flank.
But yeah, this abandonment of the issues they traditionally represented to try and attract the soft centre right voters might not cause their traditional base to vote for the Tories. But it might send their centrists to the Lib Dems, their lefties to the Greens/SNP/etc and their "I just want change, any change" supporters to Reform. Along with increasing apathy and reducing turnout on their former core. Polling certainly seems to indicate that this is happening.
If he doesn't realise that then he probably also doesn't realise that all this dictatorship tooling he's installing is more than likely going to fall into the hands of Reform at the next election.
He'll have to live with the consequences as will the rest of us.
The voters misunderstood too. How much evidence and examples from the period of 1997-2010 did people need? All a quick google away
A harsh lesson in believing the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Though mostly in the UK it's usually just apathetic "well time for the other party to have go" (due to 14 years of the last lot) more than anything more educated
People vote for an idea of Labour that Labour in the last 25 years has not been able to live up to unfortunately.
I don't understand why this needs to be linked to a smartphone. No issue with a national ID, but should we really shackle everything to a phone? They're already lost on the questions coming in about those who don't have one.
Is this just going to be a cheeky kickback to Palantir given the investment last week: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership...
I genuinely think the next move will be using it as part of their age verification check. I am guessing they want it to be your online id. No more anonymous internet usage.
It is really grim what is happening to the UK. For the most part no one gives a shit. And if you do, you are automatically branded as "right wing".
Really? I've generally seen more people on the left giving a shit about government overreach etc
> No more anonymous internet usage
And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.
So sad for Britain. But the rest of the countries are eager to follow. Thankfully war is starting soon.
Anti-migrant rhetoric used to push control that will only ever apply to citizens from the supposed party you should have voted for if you're pro-migration is wild.
One step closer to 24/7 total surveillance. Once this is established, they’ll make it mandatory for using web sites, chat apps, etc…
Any digital ID not using a form of blockchain tech is doing it wrong in my view.
We changed the URL from https://news.sky.com/video/all-british-adults-to-require-a-d..., which is a video, to a text article that appears to give the important background info.
We've seen this before and we'll probably see it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
There will be no requirement for individuals to carry their ID or be asked to produce it
Yet.
This will never happen in the UK.
Nice crystal ball you have there.
There's a lot of resistance to this because people can see this is the big pill they want you to swallow. Then smaller ones can follow.
You might need digital ID recorded to buy a house. Then a car. Then eventually pretty much anything.
Any legislation allowing the State to link systems via digital ID would be unremarkable and not newsworthy, but the end result could be the Panopticon we are all dreading, or perhaps a toolkit for more hardline governments in the future.
For now, you can sign a Petition [1] against the introduction of Digital ID. In the future, you may need to submit digital ID before signing such a petition (rather than the current email address validation). Imagine what a tool that could be for identifying dissenters and undesirables.
[1] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
This appears to just be an extension (in free app form) of the UK government “One Login” system used to get access to most government web services. This currently has about 12 million users.
https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/keir-starme...
The petition against this has so far managed to surpass the one opposing online age verification:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
I look forward to Parliament’s long-worded “no.” These petitions often seem more about managing dissent than enabling meaningful change.
Digital ID is the pattern of the mark in revelation.
Once you let go of God (worship of truth and love) the government or other totalitarian force will try to control people top down. The logical way is to identify them.
You go from a system of free will and distributed cognition to one of enforcement top down. New things can always be added to it as you don't control it. All the "problems" of the states will tag along.
Making it digital is way worse than anything before because it allow to control you without having to pay a cost in enforcement, you control the flow of money, of exchange, you let the computer control people allowing a system so top down the Nazi and communist couldn't even imagine.
Worse part, it's already there for sure but in shadow form, they have all the info about the people, it's just not tied to financial transactions and out there in the public.
How's this going to work in Norther Ireland? They haven't thought of that have they?
I am in two minds on this.
1) I don't like centralised ID, its ripe for abuse.
2) I don't like the idea of crapita/accenture/G4S/some other dipshit company designing and running this.
However
if its an extension of the government gateway, then actually the only "innovation" here is the presumable fine for not keeping it up to date. (that and the smartphone integration, which I suspect is largely symbolic)
So long as its GDS rolling it out, and its properly designed (two big ifs) then in principle it could be a useful as the original GDS scheme to make government services "digital"
But, the problems of authoritarianism are not to be ignored. starmer doesn't have the bollocks to be a dictator, but jenrick and farage do. Our constitution has no guards against authoritarian capture, its just "good men" doing "good deeds". That was easily overridden with Boris. A decent majority in the House of commons gives you alomst unlimited power of the state.
Exactly, as I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385512 it's a question of trust and purpose; I don't trust these people, the companies behind them, the public opinion they choose to pander to, and the stated purpose of immigration enforcement.
Something similar to Estonia would be much less controversial.
What did Estonia do correctly that UK has not?
If it's only applicable to citizens then how do they hope it will help on migration?
Edit: The Times says this is to include all workers:
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/digital-id-comp...
When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease
This is how things work in Japan. If you are not a Japanese citizen then the police can ask to see your residence card to confirm your status.
From Wikipedia:
"Tourism in the United Kingdom is a major industry and contributor to the U.K. economy, which is the world's 10th biggest tourist destination, with over 40.1 million visiting in 2019, contributing a total of £234 billion to the GDP"
Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.
Wouldn't that push people into black markets for day to day living?
IDs don't help because the moment the ID is useful the government will find a way to hand them out to migrants.
Reminds me a scene in "Friends" - people boarding an airplane asking the crew "Did you fix the issue of missing Falange?"; "Yes sir, we fixed it!"
So this applies to sectarian areas of Northern Ireland as well as every other part of the UK, then.
You appear to have buried the point you’re trying to make here
Absolutely, calling it a ‘Brit’ card will make it wildly unpopular in certain areas let alone the headaches in terms of the common travel area and the Good Friday agreement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#:~:text=...
>Article 1 (vi), commonly referred to as the birthright provisions, states that both governments, "Recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish, or British, or both
In Sweden we have bank id that you can optionally use as ID (new feature). But its mostly used to validate purchases, sign things, or login to banks, government websites or whatever website might use it to auth. It does not hand over all id information to the site that uses it to identify you, just name and personal number.
Quite ... a papers please moment.. if I recall correctly, South Korea has it where you have to register with the government to get an assigned username and password.
Finally, a digital form of “papers, please”
Glory to Arstotzka.
He, this Starmer guy seems weird.
Headline (here and on Sky) is clickbait - should read that this is a PROPOSAL.
This is a proposal at a party conference, not law. Previous initiatives along these lines have not come to pass, and this is unlikely to as well.
Expect universal rejection by the tories, lib dems and reform in parliament, purely because it’s a Labour initiative, and expect plenty of Labour MPs to disobey the whip.
From the BBC this morning:
“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calls it a "desperate gimmick", while the Lib Dems fear it would force people to turn over their private data”
If it does somehow get beyond the commons, expect lords to quash it.
I give this about a 20% chance of actually coming to pass.
Digital IDs will be used to restrict your internet access.
They'll roll them out gradually. You won't need one at first. You'll still show your passport, driving license etc, until one day you give up because the digital version is convenient and you "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? Have you got something to hide?
Then they'll attack the easiest target: porn. We already have age-verification laws, implemented through dodgy third-party providers. But now everyone has digital government ID: we "might as well" unify things so all the porn sites check your age using the centralised government system. What's your problem? Why do you care? Won't you THINK OF THE CHILDREN??? You want to let CHILDREN watch PORN???
Then comes online retail. After all, the Southport killer bought his knife from Amazon — that was the front page headline on every paper, remember how organic and uncoordinated that was? It could all have been avoided with better age verification. And hey, we already have a way to verify age with our digital IDs. We "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? You want to let CHILDREN buy KNIVES?
And what about social media? Kids shouldn't use Facebook, it's bad for them. Australia already bans under 16s from social media. We already have age verification for other things. We "might as well". WHY DO YOU CARE????? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Oh, that's handy, everyone's social media accounts are now tied to their real identities. That'll come in handy when people say nasty things that the government doesn't like. After all, those riots only happened because of "misinformation". Why do you need to stay anonymous anyway? What's the problem? Why do you care? Got something to hide? You're in favour of HATE SPEECH??
The slippery slope has never been more lubricated.
That all sounds plausible, but why doesn't it happen in other EU countries where digital ID is required?
Unlike the NI number, which you can't legally work without...
This is not true. You can work without a NI number, you will just be given an emergency tax code. A NI number is not ID, it is a reporting number.
Your card literally says, "THIS IS NOT IDENTIFICATION"
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45381810
Presenter:
>digital id will be made mandatory for all adults in an effort to tackle small boats
WTF? It's obvious when a small boat of Africans turns up they are not Brits and making Brits carry ID will make zero difference there.
Gotta track those breadlines
Reminder that the UK arrests 12000/year for online posts, by far the most in the West.
The UK already has government issued ID, the proof of age card. This is about tying your identity to your online behaviour.
My prediction is that it will soon be a requirement for all websites and apps with user-generated content to require authentication with the UK government's Digital ID OAuth provider and that requirement will include linking the user's username to their Digital ID. It won't require websites and apps to pay a third-party provider to check users' identity, so the UK government can argue that it doesn't place a disproportionately burdensome cost on smaller websites and apps.
After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.
In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.
This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.
I remember when the Internet was celebrated as decentralized media, allowing common citizens to criticize repressive regimes. Today it seems like the west is emulating the countermeasures already perfected by those repressive regimes.
Internet peaked too early to build any countermeasures for this.
"But it’s not just “online comments” as Yaxley-Lennon seems to imply. A police officer quoted deep within the article explains that these acts include “any form of communication,” and can relate to “serious domestic abuse-related crimes.” "
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
Yeah, not really online posts though is it.
"can relate to" is weasely. What are the actual numbers?
Administrative detections live and well.
Do they not already have the equivalent of a US social security card? (For the employment eligibility, not the program benefits.) Is this something much different from that?
You aren't required to show your social security card to your employer. You aren't even required to have the physical card for almost all purposes. It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/assets/EN-05-10553.pdf
> It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.
The US tried that back when Social Security Numbers were introduced. It specifically said it was for tax-purposes (a context where it might've been adequately-secure) and not to be used for anything else.
Yet without any actual penalties against "other places", it got misused everywhere by companies trying to save a buck on primary-key choice and authenticating people.
Its the I-9 thats required, the SSN card is just one way to satisfy that
They have a couple “numbers”, but not a id “card” besides a passport (which only citizens get, not permanent residents). ID cards are pretty standard across EU.
We have a “national insurance number” used for tax purposes but it’s just a number that you fill in in forms; no-one asks to see the cards. I’m not sure they even issue the physical cards anymore? I lost mine a long time ago.
Kafkaesque doesn't mean that much anymore when reality is far darker.
Andy French and I applaud you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H_peKI6R0
Wanna bet lol
this is corny and weird. feels like cyberpunk, government run oligarchy. however, maybe this will improve the UK and stop all the illegals. about time they clean up that country. yuck
What the hell is with these overly-draconian bills prioritizing control over individual rights being passed as of late?! The online safety act & now this. Our private right to anonymity & privacy has utterly gone out the window at this point...
I don't think this is on a par with the online safety act. That was fundamentally flawed. This isn't a huge issue and the benefits for ease of access to government services is a positive step. One thing that users of government services face is the need to provide documentation that supports their request. This can be an impediment to users accessing services that they are entitled to in a timely manner.
The biggest risk is from a data breach and this information being accessed by unauthorized parties, but that is something all online services are at risk from. The absolute worst way to implement this will be to contract it out to a third party. If it is built and maintained by civil servant developers who have already proved their mettle with a variety of govuk services then I would have confidence in it. If it is farmed out to Fujitsu or some other 3rd party then it will be an shithshow and an expensive one at that.
It will be fine https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366631525/Our-worst-day-...
What’s the point of easier access if it comes at the cost of our rights?
The potential for BritCard to be used for surveillance outweighs the benefits of convenience tenfold... Privacy is not something we should compromise for easier access to services- what starts as a way to "streamline services" can quickly turn into a horrible mechanism for tracking citizens under the guise of security..
It'll be handed to Palantir. Starmer has run out of things to sell off to billionaires and the only reason this bill exists is so he can sell off the actual citizens too.
Couldn’t agree more.
For reference:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership...
Is it getting a little too obvious it’s coordinated?
This is a plan so we shall see what happens...
This is widely unpopular because the idea of ID cards is unpopular in general in the UK and the people also clearly understand that the argument that this would combat illegal immigration is total rubbish. Even the comments on The Guardian's website are overwhelmingly negative, which should really tell the government something.
The proposal is also drastic because it would be de facto mandatory for all residents. It's hilarious and pathetic to see the government argue that it wouldn't be mandatory, just only needed to get a job (which probably means also mandatory to rent and to study)...
An unpopular government trying to out-do itself.
Id cards are not unpopular with the general public. That's just what the daily mail wants you to think.
https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3lzq2w3ovgk2...
> Id cards are not unpopular with the general public.
At the time of writing, 1,017,754 British people have already signed the official petition opposing them; a petition that has only been running a matter of hours.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
This is HN, it is unsurprising that you will find complaints of people who think governments are icky. You know, the usual libertarian bullshit.
I lived in countries that have mandatory unique IDs, and countries that don't. Typically the countries that do not are more a pain in the ass to deal with, because institutions will proxy to the next best thing in the absense of an actual ID, typically documents that are not mandatory and not supposed to be used as ID, but end up being used like that anyway.
There's three separate questions:
- is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
- is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
and the big, third one:
- where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
> - is it a good idea to tie various public records together under a unique ID
Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.
> - is it a good idea to issue voluntary ID for those situations where people need to prove it
One of the countries I lived in had a system similar to this one. It worked fine - typically you only needed this ID when opening a bank account or registered for work. Originally it was a tax registration ID (which is why it was related to banking and working), but it was secure enough that it was later repurposed as the actual unique ID. Nowadays I think they issue one to every registered person (e.g. newborns).
> - where is this going to be made mandatory and under what circumstances will it be used against people?
We are talking about the government here, who has the monopoly of force. If you live in an authoritarian country where the government fucks over citizens, they will do it to you irrespective of you having a mandatory ID or not.
My actual main concern is the level of access private corporations have to the records tied to this unique ID. I am highly suspicious of corporations (e.g.: banks, healthcare providers, etc).
It's just so frakking disappointing for a there to finally be a huge labor landslide in 2024 then for their leaders to turn around and be ongoingly in bed just the same with right wing fascism. There was such a clear mandate for something different something better something good, and it's such a stark betrayal, such a vile repudiation than republicanism is ever going to be acceptable to see such a mass betrayal such a hard sell out. To Palantir grade fascist information overloading control that Kier would commit to. Ugly gross time line of no good. One would kind of hope winning elections might meet something better than right wing fascist over-control, but no, not here. Disgraceful.
Right wing are against this.
I hope the card will include an asymmetric digital signature from a government authority. That way, concerned members of the public will be able to verify anyone else’s Brit Card.
This would in turn enable citizen-operated checkpoints to verify the Britishness of food delivery drivers, mosque worshipers, suspected pedos, anyone who smells a bit too much like curry or garlic, or blokes what look funny like they aint from round ere.
Marvellous! /s
HARD eye-roll at the libertarian scaremongering about this basic, sensible idea to tame the identity mess.
* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc
* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.
* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.
The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!
This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
Orwell was born in India. You should learn a little about him before saying everything is Orwellian
British India.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Vote Labour respectively a "people's worker party", get this.
ID cards were already brought in under Labour about 20 years ago - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10164331.
They would have allowed EU travel without a passport, but sadly didn't take off. Initially they would have incorporated driving licenses too - lots of people already carry a driver's license.
Ironically I've of the reasons for not having them, back in the noughties, was because it would target minorities.
Now, the right wing are beying for blood over immigration, national IDs do seems like they would reduce the ability of illegal immigrants to work/collect benefits. Tories left a massive immigration problem, exacerbated by Brexit.